Posts Tagged ‘backups’
Unfortunately, when engaging with a new client, I almost always encounter two issues. First, the client thinks that their backups have been configured optimally. Upon review, I find that they are not. Second, the client thinks that they have good backup data. Upon testing, I find that they cannot restore from backups they think completed “successfully.”
To help avoid these common, yet dangerous misconceptions, this article identifies three critical issues related to backups: immutability, an air gap, and proper testing and verification. At the end, I provide three simple questions to ask your tech team to ensure your data is properly secured.
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A year ago, no one could have predicted that countless businesses would shift to a remote work model. The pandemic hit hard and fast, and small businesses had to think on their toes. Many had only a few weeks to adapt. It was stressful and extremely challenging.
Looking back on it, many SMBs wish they’d had a plan in place that would have made things easier. When the pandemic hit in February/March 2020, SMBs had to absorb the huge cost of getting their employees up and running off-site. Not only was it costly, but it also took a lot of coordination and on-the-fly planning. This meant things slipped through the cracks, including cyber security.
As they say, hindsight is 20/20. You may wish you had a plan in place or had more time, but you didn’t. A vast majority didn’t. However, you can still plan for the future! While you never know when disaster is going to strike, you CAN be prepared for it. Whether that disaster is a pandemic, flood, fire or even hardware failure, there are steps you can implement today that will put you in a better place tomorrow. Here’s how to get started.
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If your data is important to your business, you cannot afford to have your operations halted for days – even weeks – due to data loss or corruption. A disaster can happen at any time, and most occur at the most inconvenient moments. If you aren’t already prepared, you run the risk of having a disaster come before you have in place a plan to handle it. Here, we will outline 10 things you should have in place to make sure your business can get back up and running again in the event of a disaster.
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As you know, IT is essential; but in our experience, most company leaders grossly overpay for their IT department while simultaneously NOT getting the critical data protection and security they need. The fact is, IT is the “dark arts” for many company leaders. Leaders feel forced to trust that they are being treated fairly by their in-house IT department. Too often, we find that’s not the case.
During normal times, overpaying for an IT department is a survivable situation. Right now, however, we are FAR from normal, and every company leader must be not only extremely prudent with overhead and costs, but also HYPER vigilant to protect against a cybersecurity breach while employees are working remote with home PCs and unprotected networks.
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You say you have an archive of your data, that’s all you need. I’d say not quite. Data archives and backups are different—as in they are meant for different things.
In today’s world where we are confronting more natural disasters, more cyberattacks and greater risks to your business continuity. I want to make sure you are well-informed on the nuanced differences between data backups and archives so that you are certain your organization has the tools it needs to recover quickly.
First, what is a backup?
You can think of a backup as a copy of data that you can use to restore that data in case of loss or damage. The original data will not be deleted after a backup is made (in fact, you may have backups every single day or hour in a day, depending on how sensitive your organization is to data continuity).
Many organizations will retain backups for a certain amount of time (commonly a data retention policy spans a month or two).
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