Comprehensive Guide to Backup Planning

Comprehensive Guide to Backup Planning

Backup! This is among the first things that come to anyone’s mind when disaster strikes. Typically, there’s a common assumption that all businesses have long-term backup strategies. But does yours have one?

Your organization should have a backup plan. If your organization already has one, you’re halfway there to keeping your business and assets safe. Your backup strategy can be considered valid if you regularly test it and are confident that the process works. As such, you’ll have peace of mind in terms of your data security.

A failed backup plan can have catastrophic implications for your organization. Apart from compliance issues, you also risk a damaged reputation.

Why Backup Planning Should Be Your Forefront Objective

A comprehensive backup plan benefits your business in the following ways:

• Reduced costs – Without backup planning, it’ll be hard to start over after the business crumbles down. Recovering the lost data and clients can be daunting and expensive. Losing client data, regardless of the cause, can undermine your integrity. Restoration during such scenarios is almost impossible and can be costly.
• An alternative operations strategy – Businesses nowadays push through a harsh external environment with different natural disasters. When such twisted happenings occur, plan B will buffer the business and compensate for any losses that you’ve incurred.
• No lost data – Data is your most valuable asset, and losing you could massively cost you. Backup planning facilitates data recovery despite the seriousness of the impact. The plan will provide avenues for storing data in cloud-based and off-site locations and enable staff to access the needed information from any location and using various devices.
• Peace of mind for entrepreneurs – Malicious third parties or staff members can access crucial data and delete it. But with a great backup plan, you’ll professionally retrieve your data from both cloud-based software and off-site locations. As such, business owners can rest assured that their data is secure even if it’s been deleted from the on-premise system.
• Protected business image – An excellent backup plan protects your business’ reputation in the long run. Calamities and inconveniences are inevitable in a business environment, so entities must ensure that these negative factors don’t compromise operations. With a smart alternative plan, you can safeguard customers’ interests, which protects your brand image.

Elements of a Robust Backup Planning

An effective backup strategy comprises three primary elements: archiving and backups, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

Periodic Data Archiving and Backups

These should be your organization’s first line of defense. Regular backups should be done whenever you create or change data. Archiving and backups concepts are similar yet distinctive. Backups are for transient media and not necessarily a long-term solution for data storage. The backed-up assets and files may be deleted or changed in the future.

On the other hand, archives basically freeze a moment in time. They preserve the files’ final versions indefinitely.

Disaster Recovery

This includes the archives and backed up data but is designed to define how the business should react during an unforeseen IT catastrophe. For instance, if your storage solution or server crashes, how will you regain data access and recover lost data? Backups and archiving protect the information, but it’s also essential to restore the surrounding applications and infrastructure.

Business Continuity

Disaster recovery mainly focuses on data preservation. However, it may not consider how fast you achieve this goal or the impact of the task on your overall productivity, and this is where business continuity comes into play. This crucial element of backup planning keeps your workers and operations running throughout the setback.

You’re Home!

Comprehensive backup planning requires an expert’s eye; that’s why you need an experienced partner by your side. Schilling IT is ready to reinforce your backup planning efforts through our personalized IT support. Reach out to get our instant free services quote.