How To Build A Data Storage And Backup Strategy

Having data backup for your business is indispensable to ensure your business continuity in case your data is compromised by a disaster or by cyberattacks. Backups are points of recovery that help you restore your lost or corrupted data. They can also be used to recover old data or information that you might have deleted from your computer system.

A backup shouldn’t be housed in your business premises but at a different location. In case you don’t have an established IT department that can undertake your data backup, you can hire managed IT services so you can have a scheduled backup plan for your business information.

To get you started on how you can have a perfect data backup and storage strategy, read the strategies below.

Decide Which Data To Backup 

You’re supposed to determine the data you want to have a backup for. Every type of data you choose to back up needs to have a priority that defines the level of impact on your business once the data is lost.

Moreover, the choice of your backup data instructs the kind of backup to use, the amount of storage space you need, the security measures to use in preserving the data, and the cost of implementing your backup strategy.

Determine Your Backup Storage 

In this step, you need to have an approach for accomplishing your backup plan. Decide on the following questions:

• Which storage devices should you use for backup?
• How easy should the backup be accessible for continued business operations?

Backup Storage Options

There are several options for backup storage such as USB disks, storage area networks (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), cloud, and tapes. Each type of storage media provides a different level of recoverability and accessibility.

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Decide your preferred recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RTO refers to the maximum downtime before recovery while RPO determines the amount of data loss that can be tolerated.

Location For Your Backup Storage

The priority of your data can be used to decide where your backup should be stored, either in your business premises or offsite by use of cloud services. Backup stored with your premises can be easily accessed but can be lost or damaged in case of a disaster. Cloud-based backup services are reliable, secure, and accessible when needed. Some organizations prefer having both local and cloud storage for easy access from the premises and security in case of a disaster. One of those backup options is air gapping. With it, you’ll ensure that your sensitive data is safely stored offline and disconnected so that hackers can’t access it through the internet.

Know Your Likely Threats And Risks

You need to pay attention to the risks and threats your business is likely to face. This helps you to appropriate the possible cost of service disruption of data loss and ascertain the areas of your infrastructure vulnerabilities. The possible threat for business data includes human errors, ransomware attacks, natural disasters, power outages, hardware and software failures, among others.

Knowing possible sources of risk helps you and your team come up with mitigation and prevention measures to deploy. Understanding your risks also helps you step up your infrastructure resilience and sustainability.

Choose A Backup Schedule

Your backup schedule should be determined by the needs of your business, how critical your data is, and the level of impact to your business upon loss. Not-so-important files can be backed up weekly or even monthly.

On the other hand, where there’s a production of a large amount of data every day, you may consider hourly backups or even shorter than that. Common backup schedules include continuous, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Other than that, you need to set the appropriate time you should do your backup without disrupting your business processes. Many organizations prefer running their backup schedule overnight or during the weekends when there are minimal activities within the organizations.

Choose A Backup Administrator 

You need to have trained individuals in your team who can control your backup and recovery processes from beginning to end. Your team of experts should be able to:

• Run scheduled backups from your backup software
• Note system vulnerabilities and be able to fix them
• Match backup strategy with changing business needs
• Sensitize other workers of new backup policies
• Test the backup strategy to ascertain everything works as expected

Carry Out Backup Testing

At this stage, the backup strategy should be tested to ensure it works well by integrating it into the data protection infrastructure. Put into consideration what, when, and how often you should test your backups. It needs to be tested with certain disaster scenarios to prove the recovery ability of your strategy.

Conclusion 

It’d be a big risk for your business to operate without data storage and backup measures. Whether you’re operating a small business or a large company, you can implement the ideas mentioned here to establish a solid data storage and backup strategy.