Keeping to a backup strategy can sometimes be like keeping to a New Years Resolution. Even with the noblest of intentions, they can be all too easy to break.
Now that we’re half a month into the New Year, here are some New Years resolutions we’d highly recommend for your business backup strategy.
1. Make Sure Your 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is Correct
Having a 3-2-1 strategy in place is important, but make sure it’s optimized for if you experience a data loss scenario.
By fine-tuning the details like your type of offsite protection and your NAS arrangement, you can identify and eliminate any potential single points of failure.
2. Have an Anti-Ransomware Strategy
Experts are predicting ransomware infection rates are going to rise significantly in 2018. This is why you need to have both front-of-house protections (firewalls, anti-malware, email scanning) and back-of-house protections (redundant backup copies, active backup protection against ransomware) in place.
Ransomware can come into your system through multiple avenues, and businesses are particularly at risk due to having a larger network infrastructure to compromise. This is why doing your due diligence to insulate your machines from ransomware is a fantastic 2018 resolution.
3. Confirm your RPOs and RTOs
Every business has an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). It’s worth checking to see that expectations are the same across the board regarding yours.
To give a quick refresher, your RPO is the maximum amount of data your business can afford to lose, as measured by time. To figure out what your RPO is, ask yourself if your business could afford to lose one hour of work. How about two hours of work, or two days?
If the most you could afford to lose is, for example, eight hours, this is your business’s RPO. Your backup frequency should always be equal or less than your RPO. E.g. If you can only afford to lose up to eight hours of data, then your backups should probably be performed every seven hours or less. This way, you never lose more than your business can afford.
Your RTO is the amount of time a business can be without a service, without incurring significant risks or significant losses. Your RTO is the answer to the question “What is a reasonable time frame for it to take to recover services after a business disruption?”
Make sure your backup schedule is set up to meet your business’s RPOs and RTOs. BackupAssist has many different features specifically designed to help you meet these, both as part of our core license and specialized add-ons.
4. Have a Prepared Outage Plan (Scheduled & Unscheduled)
For advice on how to write an outage plan, read our Outage Best Practice Guide.
