Many business leaders operate with the assumption their organization is following the best practices for backup and recovery, and don’t realize how their policies are falling short. The IT department uses a system that is meant to follow the 3-2-1 rule, putting three copies of data on two different storage media with one copy held offsite, and everyone feels that’s enough.
When businesses discover their safeguards are inadequate or a nightly backup has failed, it often comes as a shock. A breach or failure is usually the result of security policies that haven’t been followed, important files scheduled for backup once a week instead of daily, or users who have confused syncing to the cloud for backing up with independent copies.
Backup and recovery is not a line item to check off after the infrastructure is in place. It is the keystone that determines whether every other investment in infrastructure actually holds up when something goes wrong.
In This Article:
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Why Backups Fail When Businesses Need Them Most
A backup job that completes successfully every night can still fail the business. It could be sitting on the wrong network segment and failing to capture important information, or an alert might be routed to a mislabeled queue, which would prevent anyone from seeing that the job hasn’t completed.
A business in a regulated industry, such as a dental practice managing HIPAA-covered patient records, has different restore priorities than a business in a non-regulated industry. But the underlying failure points look almost identical.
A trusted managed IT services provider can apply the experiences they have had across industries to a business’s individual situation. They can support a company with:
- Individual file restoration
- Disk-level backup and recovery
- Enhanced security
- Business continuity
- Cloud data replication
- Automated backup scheduling
By working with a managed services provider, companies can focus on their core business while knowing their data is secure in an offsite facility.
Testing Turns a Backup Plan Into a Recovery Plan
A backup schedule tells a business that copies of its data exist somewhere. A recovery plan tells the business how long it will take to get back to work and what condition that data will be in when it arrives. Those are different things that become obvious during an actual test restore.
The two numbers that matter most in backup and recovery plans are:
The amount of time to restore service after an outage (the recovery time objective).- The maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, the business can accept (the recovery point objective).
A managed services provider can perform a structured recovery test to find the actual restore time, so that the business can improve their recovery plan and plan for a worst-case scenario. Often, businesses fail to account for the time it takes to restore data to replacement hardware, reconfigure network settings, and reinstall software dependencies in the proper order.
Redundancy Guards Businesses From Failure and Attack
A single backup copy, no matter how current, is a single point of failure. People who engage in ransomware attacks understand backups are the Achilles heel of a business, making backup files one of the first areas they target.
Infrastructure built for reliability treats redundancy as a design principle rather than an add-on. Following the 3-2-1 rule, multiple copies should be stored in more than one location. At least one copy should be isolated or immutable so it cannot be altered or deleted by the same attack that compromised the network.
Cloud hosting has made this kind of redundancy accessible for small and midsize businesses. By moving backups into the cloud, businesses can store data offsite in geographically separated locations.
What has not changed is the need for a business to know which systems are backed up, how often, where each copy lives, and what the recovery process looks like.
A managed services provider can help you build redundancy and recovery testing into your daily operations. This way, protection never rests on one server, one location, or one untested assumption.
The Real Cost of an Unplanned Outage
The financial exposure of an unplanned outage is well documented. According to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), a single hour of downtime, including lost revenue, labor, and recovery, can approach $100,000 in losses for large businesses. While ITIC notes that small- and medium-sized businesses might lose only a tenth of that, they also do not have those resources to lose.
What isn’t accounted for in ITIC’s data are the soft costs, such as reputational damage, that are difficult to quantify. While going dark for a short time might only cost a business those customers who could not access a website when they needed, exposing sensitive data through a breach can take years to recover from.
These issues are risks that can be planned for or even avoided. A business with tested backups, documented recovery steps, and redundant, isolated copies faces very different odds than one that has never tried to restore its own data.
Building Recovery Into Infrastructure From the Start
Backup and recovery works best when designed alongside a business’s network, security, and telephony systems, not layered on afterward as a separate contract with a separate vendor. At Advantage Tech, we provide backup and recovery services designed to keep your data safe and easily accessible.
Backup scheduling can be customized by the user, including real-time backups or daily and weekly cycles. Our cloud environments use advanced encryption and multi-factor authentication, and are built to support compliance requirements including PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Contact us today to discuss your needs and start building a recovery plan that works for you.