Hope For The Best, Prepare For The Worst: Data Backup Strategies

Summary: This 3-minute article discusses the importance of small businesses planning for data recovery in the face of breakdowns, cyberattacks and unexpected disasters. Learn the crucial steps to ensure your business data is protected and you are prepared to restore your data and be fully operational as swiftly as possible after an event. Contact GEEKAID Computer and Network Support at https://www.geek-aid.com/ for more comprehensive business IT solutions and guidance on planning for unexpected events.

What Is Data Recovery?

Nobody enjoys planning for the unexpected. Often, we put off planning for unforeseen events until confronted with one. By then, it is too late for planning. But, for small businesses, a lack of proper planning for negative events opens the possibility for them to lose their company’s most crucial data to hardware failures, natural disasters and cyberattacks. For businesses to thrive, they must have a plan for protecting, saving and recovering data in the event of emergencies.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery) defines data recovery as “a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media, or files when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives, solid-state drives, USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs RAID subsystems and other electronic devices.”

Why Backup Business Data?

For many companies, their data is their most valuable asset. Without access to their data, many companies would be unable to operate. Unfortunately, cybercrime has increased by over 400% since before the pandemic and one of the hackers' primary goals is to breach data unlawfully. In addition to thwarting business operations, a data breach can affect customers and vendors. Once a hacker has access to your system, everyone connected to your company is at risk. Even if your SMB is not attacked, data corruption without a backup can lead to disastrous consequences. Regaining access to data that has been compromised is critical to minimizing any resulting damages. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to protect your small to midsized business data:

• Define Your Data Threats – Beyond cyberattacks, businesses must be prepared for all forms of emergencies, including fires, natural disasters, power outages, etc. By identifying the threats, planning for data recovery will be more comprehensive.
• Install Robust Security Protection – The goal of cyber security is to detect, mitigate and stop cyberattacks on your data. By having a data recovery plan in place, when data breaches occur, you will be in a better position to reduce the damage, eliminate the threat and restore your data for full functionality.
• Identify The Data Most Critical To Operating Your Business – For a data recovery plan to be most effective, SMBs should prioritize the data in order of which data segments are most critical for continuing company operations. By understanding the relative importance of each category of your business’s data, you will understand what data is most important and how employees access it.
• Set Goals For Your Data Recovery – By knowing which company data is most valuable, you can then calculate recovery point objectives or RPO. RPOs are calculations of the maximum amount of crucial data your SMB can afford to lose. Also, recovery plans should set recovery time objectives or RTOs. By setting goals and prioritizing data SMB management can better plan data backups and perform restoration as quickly as possible.
• Test And Update Your Data Recovery Plan – To know whether or not your recovery plan is viable, it should be tested to identify any gaps. Also, data recovery plans are not “one and done.” Recovery plans must be fluid, evolving with the company’s growth and evolving to protect against new threats and address the ever-changing target landscape of cyber criminals. In addition, regular IT maintenance and hardware contingencies should be included in your plan. Planning and policies are key, but failing software, hardware and network connections must also be addressed. The more detailed the plan, the smoother and more timely the data recovery will be.
• Design A Company Data Protection Policy – Data protection best practices are a company-wide responsibility. All employees must be on the same page concerning the proper handling of company data and what to do when the company falls victim to a data-related event. By creating and updating the data protection policy, all your employees will know how they can best support your company’s data protection.

Your Business Needs A Data Backup And Recovery Plan

Creating a comprehensive data protection and recovery plan is well worth the time and money. If a cyberattack or emergency puts your data at risk, having a plan in place will prepare you and your employees for potential data threats in advance. It is never a good scenario to have company data threatened. Still, with careful preparation and a thorough plan, you can protect your SMB from crippling data breaches and losses and work as a team to restore your data and get your company back to full operations in as little time as possible.