What Is a Data Backup, what Data Should I Back Up, and How?
By Dennis Shelly
Part 2:
What is Advanced Disaster Recovery (ADR) Backup?
A disaster happens when a catastrophic event occurs that has a negative impact on your organization and/or data. The incident might be natural, such as an earthquake, flood, or fire destroying a data storage location. A disaster can also be caused by humans, such as an accident or worse a ransomware attack. Disaster recovery is the method through which the data is restored to a previous backup. In addition, enterprises are increasingly putting aside a complete backup of whole environments — whether on-premises or in the public cloud — to guarantee that all of the data can be made available immediately in the case of a disaster.
Why Do You Need a Disaster Recovery and Backup Plan?
Data is critical to all sorts and sizes of organizations. A solid data backup and disaster recovery strategy is recommended as it gives a roadmap for those in control in a disaster scenario to know who is doing what and in what order to restore operational functionality. Your disaster recovery plan should encompass both people and procedures, and it should serve as a roadmap for employees to follow while they restore your critical data. A solid data backup and disaster recovery plan should also guarantee that your data is always protected – both during and after it is moved from day-to-day, production systems for short- and long-term storage. With an optimal backup and disaster recovery plan, you’ll always have your data at your fingertips if you need it.
Consider what would happen if the data required to run your organization, department, or agency was unavailable for even a few minutes, many alone hours, days, or weeks. Customers would be dissatisfied or in the event of ransomware, your entire organization might be destroyed. All of these scenarios are avoided with effective backup and recovery of sensitive data.
How to select the best backup plan
You must assess several important factors before choosing the type of backup you should choose. According to the importance of the data, organizations frequently combine several data backup strategies. The SLAs that apply to an application, in terms of data access and availability, recovery time targets, and recovery point objectives, should guide a backup plan.
Establishing a backup plan
The majority of organizations develop a backup policy to direct the types and techniques of data protection they use and guarantee that crucial organizational data is constantly and routinely backed up. The backup strategy also generates a checklist that IT can keep track of and adhere to since that department is in charge of protecting all of the organization’s important data. A backup policy should contain a backup schedule. The policies are written so that others can back up and restore data if the primary backup administrator is not accessible.
Data retention rules are frequently included in backup policies, particularly for an organization in regulated industries. Predefined data retention rules might result in the automated deletion or transfer of data to different media once it has been stored for a certain period of time. Individual users, departments, and file types can all have their own data retention policies.
Because backed-up data is useless if it cannot be recovered when needed, backup policies need to put greater emphasis on recovery than on actual backup. The majority of backup plans used to be focused on moving data to and from tape. Today, the majority of data is backed up to a local backup drive or a public cloud solution are often used. Each target has a unique method for transporting data to and from the disc, the cloud, or tape, and the policy should take this into consideration. Additionally, backup processes might change based on the application; for instance, a database may need a different approach than a file server.
Modern Backup and Recovery Approach
The fact that data often resides in a variety of locations, including on-premises systems, clouds, and the edge, presents the single largest problem when attempting to implement an organization-wide backup and recovery plan. The time that could be spent on organizational innovation is lost managing and maintaining this disconnected data due to the massive data fragmentation caused by fragmented hardware and software and insufficient visibility into the organization’s data.
Acronis Cyber Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a backup and recovery solution that converges various point products and backs up data on a single multi-cloud data platform whether it is stored on-premise, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Customer satisfaction is the most crucial part of any organization since it leads to more sales, increased reputation, and “word of mouth” referrals. That is why Acronis is proud to be named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cyber Disaster Recovery as a Service in October 2019.
To Conclude
To ensure your critical and important data is safe, you must follow a plan, which requires you to store your data in three locations, on two types of storage, with one copy saved off-site. Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) and disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) solutions are excellent instances of this 3-2-1 method. You backup your data to your central network storage and then transfer that backup to tape or off-site cloud storage with these.
The survival of your organization is dependent on the survival of your organizational data. Define your organization’s objectives — the backup scope, RPOs, and RTOs — before implementing a reliable data backup plan. Then, install appropriate solutions, provision storage or a combination of storage, and execute and monitor backups. Only then can you be confident that your organization will be able to continue operating securely even if unforeseen situations occur.
Backing up your critical data on a regular basis can be a confusing and daunting task, especially when you have other things to focus on. EggHead IT and our data backup and disaster recovery eggsperts are here to help and answer any questions you may have.
Please contact us by visiting our website at www.eggheadit.com, by calling (760) 205-0105, or by emailing us at tech@eggheadit.com with your questions or suggestions for our next article.
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