Backups are an important, but sometimes overlooked, ingredient of an effective strategy to protect a company’s valuable data resources. March 31st is designated as World Backup Day to draw attention to this essential component of managing an IT environment. If your company does not currently prioritize backups, World Backup Day provides the perfect opportunity to get started.
Visitors to the World Backup Day website are encouraged to take a pledge stating that they will back up their important data and precious memories on March 31st. The hope is that by focusing on the importance of backups in this way, organizations and individuals who may have neglected the practice implement a solution and start protecting their valuable information.
Why Your Business Needs an Effective Backup Solution
Your business needs an effective backup solution for multiple reasons related to the protection of its IT environment and data assets. The following are the most significant incentives for implementing a comprehensive backup strategy.
- Data loss prevention – Backups protect your organization against accidental data loss caused by human error, hardware failures, or software corruption. Unexpected data loss can cripple your company’s productivity and ability to serve customers. Viable backups let you recover lost or corrupted data quickly to minimize downtime.
- Cybersecurity – Backups offer businesses protection from cyberattacks that target their data resources. They can be used to avoid paying the threat actors who launch ransomware attacks or recover from malicious corruption caused by other forms of malware. Cybercriminals may attempt to subvert this protection by corrupting the backups themselves, making it imperative that they are stored away from production data.
- Regulatory compliance – Data privacy and security regulations such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS require data to be protected with backups. The backups need to be readily available to recover data promptly and make it accessible to authorized personnel.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity – Backups are an essential component of an organization’s disaster recovery and business continuity plans. The ability to quickly recover mission-critical systems is necessary for today’s dangerous cyber threat landscape and to withstand natural disasters such as hurricanes or tornadoes.
Backup Best Practices
Organizations should adopt the following backup best practices to effectively protect their data and IT environment. These practices help maintain the security, integrity, and accessibility of your data resources.
- Implement regularly scheduled backups – Backups should be scheduled and performed regularly to ensure they capture the current state of data assets. Multiple schedules can be developed to address different types of data. For example, dynamically changing production data may need to be backed up several times a day. Test data or stable data repositories can be backed up less often to conserve resources.
- Automate and monitor the backup process – Automating streamlines the backup process and eliminates the possibility of accidentally forgetting to back up a critical system. The process should be monitored with missed or failed backups addressed to ensure all data is protected.
- Encrypt the backups – Backups should be encrypted to protect data from unauthorized access. Threat actors can use unencrypted backups to exfiltrate data or obtain confidential information useful for initiating further cyberattacks.
- Create multiple backup copies – Multiple copies of backups should be stored in different locations for enhanced resiliency. Companies can opt for on-premises backups, cloud backups, and storing backup media in offsite facilities. The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a popular choice for data protection. It involves keeping three copies of the data, the original and two backups. They should be stored on different types of media and at least one copy should be offsite.
- Test backup and recovery procedures – Backup and recovery procedures need to be tested periodically to make sure they perform as expected. Backups are useless if they cannot efficiently recover the data they are meant to protect. Both small-scale recoveries and more wide-ranging disaster recovery testing should be implemented to ensure systems and data can be recovered when necessary.
- Review and update procedures regularly – Backup procedures should be reviewed regularly and whenever changes are made to the IT environment. New systems or data assets need to be incorporated into the backup process. During a review, a company may decide to transition from an on-premises to a cloud-based backup solution.
Enterprise Backup Options
Companies have two main options when selecting a backup method. There are substantial differences between a traditional, on-premises backup infrastructure and a cloud-based solution that may influence an organization when implementing a backup strategy.
- Traditional backups – Traditional backup solutions require an organization to develop an on-premises backup infrastructure. This usually involves purchasing hardware and software to support the backup strategy. In-house technical resources are typically employed to manage and maintain the backup environment. Organizations often engage a third party to transport and store backup media in an offsite location, introducing a new attack vector to the environment.
- Cloud-based solutions – Organizations can take advantage of reduced capital costs, enhanced flexibility, improved resiliency, and virtually limitless scalability by adopting a cloud-based backup strategy. Cloud backups are stored offsite by default, addressing a major aspect of data protection. Using a cloud provider’s infrastructure eliminates the need to build an on-premises backup environment and enables a company to scale up and down as business requirements evolve. Cloud backups can be restored in alternate geographic regions to enhance resiliency in the case of large-scale outages.
VAST’s Backup Offerings
VAST has your back when it comes to protecting your data with effective backup solutions. We offer an extensive portfolio of on-premises and cloud-based solutions to fit your company’s unique requirements. Let’s highlight two of our backup offerings that will have you ready for World Backup Day.
Managed backups – VAST’s managed backup service utilizes cutting-edge technology and industry best practices to protect your critical business data. Automated scheduling and monitoring ensure your data is always protected. Our team of experienced IT professionals manages the backups so you can concentrate on running your business.
Cloud Backup as a Service (CBaaS) – Our CBaaS offering provides a managed backup solution that addresses public cloud environments, hybrid or on-premises data centers, enterprise endpoints, and SaaS products like Microsoft 365. The Service is built on Druva’s advanced backup technology and eliminates the cost of building an in-house backup environment.
Call us today and get ready for World Backup Day with an effective and efficient backup solution.
