Backup And Disaster Recovery Quiz

Without an accurate inventory of IT Systems, it’s very challenging to build a backup plan which safeguards your data. If you don’t know where the data is, how can you protect it?

While a data backup is a good start, it is only the start of a backup and disaster recovery plan (not to mention business continuity). In the event of a server failure, which could occur due to a number of different circumstances (eg. hardware failure, virus/malware infection, operating system failure, etc.), your organization could face significant downtime and expense in rebuilding and repairing the failed server. With an image backup, the entire system is protected, so in the event of a failure, the entire server can be restored to its functioning state, often times within a number of hours.

It’s important to continually backup your servers, to avoid the potential for lost data and productivity. If data backups only occur nightly, and your server experiences a data corrupting event in the late afternoon, the entire days productivity may be lost. The cryptolocker virus is one of the top threats (ransomware), and would cripple an organizations data in this manner.

Similarly with the continual onsite backup, a continual offsite backup protects your data in the event an incident, such as a flood, fire, electrical surge, etc., were to destroy your onsite server and backup.

The retention policy is an important consideration, as it may be a number of days or weeks until it is discovered that data restoration needs to occur. If this falls outside of the retention policy timeframe, that data is lost. With the low cost of onsite storage, most organizations can cost effectively retain backup data for over 90 days.

It is critical to encrypt backup data, both onsite and offsite. A backup is a centralized copy of the organizations sensitive and confidential information, and must be secured. Encrypting the data protects it, so if it were to fall into the wrong hands (or be stolen), the data would not be able to be accessed without the decryption code. Encryption is also a requirement for various industries, such as healthcare.

While computer backups are often times less critical, due to the data being saved onto the organizations server, many times employees may temporarily work with data on their local computers, which may also occur with mobile users. While less of a risk, hard drive failure and system corruption (or infection) often affect end users. While no data may be lost in a computer crash, there can be a significant amount of lost time and productivity in having to rebuild the system and reconfiguring any customized user settings.

Monitoring is a critical part of a backup plan, to ensure the backup is working as scheduled. Too many times we’ve seen a backup job fail, for any number of reasons, and no one being alerted to this status, leaving the organization unprotected. Any good backup system should include automated alerts and reporting.

No backup plan is complete unless it has been tested and verified as working correctly.

In the event an incident cripples your server infrastructure, how long will your organization be offline? Can your organization survive if you’re down for 48 hours? How will this affect the products or services you provide? Will your customers fill their need elsewhere? While having a backup of your data is good, if you cannot use that data for 48 hours due to a server failure, resulting in the loss of business, is that backup and disaster recovery plan sufficient for your needs?