Tips to Overhaul Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

As cyberattacks are getting more advanced day by day, it has become a necessity for businesses to have a solid back up and build a disaster recovery strategy. Just having a back up plan is not enough though. It does not guarantee that your business won’t suffer from a huge data loss due to security breaches in the future. In this article, we have given a list of best practices of backup strategy and disaster recovery that you IT team must follow to ensure maximum online security. Check out the below mentioned points and guidelines on how to overhaul data loss and maintain a smooth and uninterrupted business operations:

1. Depending only on your IT team may not be enough:

Always prepare for the worst when it comes to maintaining the security of your as well as your company’s vital data. In case you lose all your valuable data due to an intense cyberattack, and your network needs to be restored from scratch, always rely on automation for data recovery. Even though your IT team is extremely proficient and well trained, still relying so much on people to manually design and run scripts in order to restore your network is not a smart move. For, too much reliance on the IT team increases the risk of human errors especially when your company is under tremendous pressure to complete the recovery process as fast as possible.

2. Set a schedule for data backup:

You must a have a set cadence on how frequently your regular backups are happening, also build a guideline on what incidences can start an ad hoc backup, for example if there is any change in the configurations. Also don’t forget to analyze the current cadence to make sure if it is enough or if you need a more frequent backup routine.

3. Automatic restore of network with the help of an effective backup solution:

Generally, configuration information is not recorded and maintained properly in an organized manner, with only a few members of your IT team handling all the necessary information. Therefore, for undergoing a smooth recovery process from major data loss, you need to have all this information documented somewhere safe as well as have it automated. Every member of your team should have the knowledge about all device configuration, they should be well informed about the ‘gold standard’. In addition, you also should have a solution that will ensure automatic restoration of network to this standard whenever there is a requirement. You can also keep your network in compliance with your solution.

4. Patch management is crucial for ensuring security, stability, and smooth operations:

Patch management is a critical element of your overall network health. You should have full knowledge of what patches have been installed as well as the updates that are required for each system. Also, you should be able to verify whether the patches that have been installed are correct or not.

5. Review the process of data backup:

You should keep a record on previous data loss recovery processes. By keeping a record, you will be able to track whether the recovery time as well as overall performance is improving or not. Based on the improvement or lack of, you need to optimize your backup strategy. You can adopt advanced recovery tools to ensure fast restoration of the network.

6. Build a strong team:

The criteria for having a proficient IT team working for your company is that every member of your team should be capable enough to run operations in case of an emergency. If you notice your team is only depending on a few individuals with running operations, then it’s the time for giving them proper training. Building a strong IT team is a sign of a great business owner. Those one of few skilled employees could have taken a leave or have just resigned from your company at the time of critical security breach incident. You could risk losing years of hard work if something like that happens. Therefore, you need to make sure anyone from your team whom you authorize at the time can carry out the recovery operation without any hassle.

7. Design a simple recovery solution:

The recovery solution that has been planned and prepared by your company’s IT team should provide logs of command as well as function results while also ensuring that these are easily interpretable by everyone. Instead of having a complex process that are known and readable only by a few professionals, it is much secured to build a recovery solution using series of simple actions. This way you can make sure that the results are easily trackable. This increases your chance of backup success.

Final words:

Following the above-mentioned tips can get your IT team to examine the current backup strategies they are implementing to tackle severe data loss disasters. Not only that but your team can rebuild or optimize their backup plans based on the list for improved protection. Regardless of what strategy you may apply, you also need a solid backup solution from a trusted and reliable cloud provider to ensure maximum security for your business.