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We all tend to think we’re prepared for an emergency, until one arrives, then we find out we’re not as prepared as we thought we were. Case in point, when was the last time you checked the tire pressure of your spare tire to make sure it would work if you needed it? When’s the last time you checked the expiration date on your fire extinguisher under the sink? Backups are one of those things that we don’t think about until we need them.
We all know that technology is moving at the speed of light, all you have to do is blink and your phone is obsolete, your child needs a new laptop, and you have Microsoft surprising you with another operating system. Knowing exactly how quickly technology is advancing and how infrequently we think in detail about our emergency preparedness, are your backups meeting your needs today like they were when you deployed them?
Some of the things you need to consider regarding your backup strategy are:
Where is your data? – Is it on-premise or is it in the cloud? Is it all in one place such as a server or a NAS, or is it distributed among multiple computers?
How much data do you have?
What will it take to restore the data? – Is it simply documents, spreadsheets and other files that you need restored, or do you have applications that require full system backups to be restored?
How do you know that your data is backing up successfully?
Are you performing test restores and validating your backups? If so, how often?
How secure are your backups? Are they encrypted? Who has access to them?
The gold standard for backups is what is known as the 3-2-1 backup strategy. You should have 3 copies of your data (production and 2 backup copies), on 2 different forms of media, 1 of which is off-site. The principle behind this methodology is to protect yourself from any form of data loss, including damage to the structure such as fire, flood, etc.
Securing your backups should be as important as securing your production data. Your backups should be encrypted in transit and at rest. Accessing your backups should not only require authentication, but it should also require multi-factor authentication and logging for access and actions performed.
Radcomp has invested the time necessary to evaluate the backup best practices and select the products and vendors to provide backups that are a true 3-2-1 backup, where the data is encrypted on the device using industry leading AES-256-bit encryption and transmitted over an encrypted connection to both on-site and cloud storage. Our backups run multiple intra-daily backups for multiple restore points throughout the business day and perform bi-weekly restore testing including screenshot verification and event log capture to ensure that backups are not only running successfully but can be trusted to be restored as well.
One of today’s biggest misconceptions is that the cloud is being backed up for you. While it is true that there is versioning and some limited restore capabilities, if things are erroneously deleted there are methods in which items can be permanently deleted and your cloud provider may not be able or willing to restore them for you. There is also only a 30 day “restore from recycle bin” window. If you’re trusting all of your files to OneDrive, SharePoint or other cloud repositories, is that enough retention and reassurance?
Radcomp offers SaaS backups for both Microsoft and Google that will preserve mailboxes, files in personal drives, chat messages and more.