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Ask yourself, if you lost extremely important data today, how would you react? It would be perfectly understandable to panic. Data is the heart of your business and when it is lost or stolen it can leave permanent damage and involve a slow, costly recovery process to attempt to regain the lost data. Now more than ever hackers are finding more avenues to skip past your security systems and gain access to your private information.
If a business experiences a drive failure or ransomware that affects files critical to its operation, often it is impossible to recover data. With proper data backup, such a situation could be dealt with in a day or less with virtually zero data loss.
Deciding what to Back Up
The first step to backing up your files is to decide what files are important to you. Critical business data is often stored on a server. Often it is important to back up the entire server, the same goes for proprietary software on business workstations. Sometimes the best policy is to take an image backup of the whole workstation.
How to Back Up Your Data
Having access to reliable backups is an essential factor of efficient data management as it protects your business against any damage or loss caused to your data as a result of cyber attacks, viruses, data damage or even normal human error. Therefore, it is highly recommended to make several backups of your data (at least 3) to ensure that your information is secure and most importantly that at least one of the backups is off-site which makes it difficult for hackers and viruses to locate and attack.
Cloud storage is a great way to backup critical data, since the data is off site, and in the event of a catastrophic event where even your backups are destroyed. Often data stored in the cloud is very safe and can tolerate a loss of a hard drive or a data center outage.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) Backup Network attached storage is a great way to backup data on both at the office and at home. Network attached storage is a very simple file server which can be used for backup. Most Network Attached Storage devices also support redundant hard drives so that in the event of a failure no data is lost.
Disaster Recovery (DRAAS) This is the recommended choice for all businesses. Disaster recovery allows for full backups of servers and workstations and is best suited for critical business data. Regularly, DRAAS solutions include backup to both a NAS and the cloud. DRAAS can also provide very quick restores, or in critical operations quick switch to a different server. During a server failure it can be possible to move to a replica (copy of the server) in a matter of minutes or restore onto a new server in a matter of hours. This makes a huge difference when a server failure can mean tens of thousands of dollars per hour in business revenue losses.
Above all, Backups are Critical for your Business
If your data is backed up, you can rest easy that critical files will not be lost in an instant. The best policy is to be safe by backing up data often and to backup correctly. If you are diligent in backing up your data, you can avoid devastating and costly failures.
