Backup, recovery challenges stop failure.

Without appropriate backup, your business is at risk.

How exposed are you to data recovery after data corruption, hackers, employee theft, and fire? In regional, rural, and remote communities, I have encountered many who are confident that their data, information, and knowledge are safe. Can you rely totally on your backup and recovery procedures?

Now is the time to assess the quality of your data recovery. Tomorrow might be too late; it has gone. Even if it is recoverable, it could cost plenty to restore it. Backup in the Cloud should be a high priority. We use Microsoft OneDrive, which backs up all our documents immediately.

Far too many take little or no precautions against recovery uncertainty and disaster. Most computer applications in use today were introduced over a decade ago. Internet technology and communications (ITC)  environments were exploding without uniformity, and backup was the last resort for protection. Backups and recovery today need a radical rethink.

The goal should be to provide low-cost data insurance and support this increasingly complex, multitier, and diverse environment. With many companies, their information and knowledge are by far their most valuable asset.

The answer has been to patch backup and recovery solutions together under a common vendor management framework. This should minimise costs by moving data across the infrastructure or media.

Backups need to be reliable. Don’t lean on your understanding.

You should discuss backup and recovery along with Cloud Data Management. This will provide opportunities for protecting data, capturing new value, and making data available whenever and wherever it is needed.

With all this in mind, the critical requirement for any backup and recovery solution is to translate business-level requirements for recovery time and data recovery, known as Service Level Agreements (SLA), into instructions for gathering, placing, retaining, and expiring data.

The main problem with traditional backup and recovery systems is translating business requirements to platform executable instructions, which can require professional services. Traditional solutions lack the intelligence to optimise resources to avoid failed backups, which leads to ongoing tuning and, sometimes, new software.

The best way to evaluate your current system is to ask an executive to pick some data at random and see how close they come to achieving recovery. Compared to what they thought it should be. Compare this to the cost of downtime if recovery cannot be made efficiently and effectively.

Backup theft, cybersecurity.

Criminal activity has always been one of the most challenging areas of backup and recovery systems. Backup robbery is a favourite for hackers and identity thieves.

Extraordinary measures are required to prevent tampering and ensure regulatory compliance with sensitive data. Among other things, examine your systems to see if they are, in fact, vulnerable to underlying security issues.

If in doubt, doing nothing is not an option.

If you have any doubts about the quality of your backup or recovery procedures, contact your technology advisor as soon as possible. Should you suddenly lose data, do nothing, don’t touch anything and phone your technology advisor.

Quotable Quotes

“Establishing sound backup and recovery procedures is an investment in your future, not a cost”. Peter Sergeant

“Recovery begins from the darkest moment”. John Major