Having backups is an excellent idea, you should always have backups of your business data, but backups and disaster recovery are not the same.
Disaster recovery is what you do with your backups how long it takes to recover and what is the procedure to get your business back up and running without to much loss of time.
A simple procedure to understand is the changing of a spare tire on your car.
How long will it take to change the tire? This is the recovery time to restore your data and systems to working order, you should measure that time in minutes not hours or days.
From when will you be able to continue driving? This is recovery objective, how long ago was the last successful backup and how much time have you lost from this last backup. Nowadays with the advanced backup tools you can push that time down to a few minutes.
How far will the spare get you? Look at the quality of what you are restoring to. Will this buy you the time to get where you need to and how long will it last? Having equipment in place for the recovery can be expensive will you have spare equipment to restore.
Backup is just that it is a backup of your business data. It is the BDR that protects and provides a procedure to the restoring of a disaster striking your business. Backup comes in many shapes and forms from iCloud backups through to physical software and backups storage. What needs to be looked at is what is happening beyond this in our Disaster Recovery Plan, how do we recover this, is the backups legitimate and have we been testing the backup procedure to ensure it will work? This is all part of the Disaster Recovery plan that is BDR.
The best way to achieve this is to look at what you are backing up and what is happening with those backups, where are you storing them. What is the procedure for off-site backups if you have one. It does not matter if you have one computer or many computers and servers where the data is this is the first step in ensuring you know what to backup.
Another factor in your BDR plan is to look at your archiving of backups. How far back do you keep data, i.e. an example of this is when you have data that has actually been deleted months ago and now is the time to get a hold of that data as you only discovered it was missing. Does your current backup allow for this have you got archiving on?
There are a lot of questions in the article you need to be asking yourself as a business owner. In most cases I come across businesses that say they are backing up, but what has actually discovered that either their backup procedure is only data with no option to restore a system or they have backups that are not running correctly and the backup data is useless when it comes to restoring.
IT System Solutions provides solid advice on what you need to do for your type of business. We are more than happy to provide over the phone or through email some advice on what you should be doing. We can also provide you with a disaster recovery plan to get you started or at least review your backup procedure independently.
Call our office on 1300 849 876 or
contact us with your questions.
