It’s one thing to lose your data during a cyberattack or another unexpected event, but losing your integrity and goodwill is a completely different ballgame. All the years of hard work you invested in building your company will be in jeopardy if you suffer a loss of customer data. When your customers have no reason to trust you, they will simply take their business elsewhere rather than waiting for you to bounce back. Whether it is an ordinary human error or a deliberate cyberattack, the risk of losing your critical data is significantly higher when your employees are working remotely.
When you use the 3-2-1 backup rule, cloud storage inevitably becomes a part of your backup strategy. As per this rule, you make three copies of your data, store two copies on different media (e.g: hard drive and local storage appliance) and store one copy off-site in the form of cloud backup. You may also expand this rule by storing multiple copies of your data in different cloud locations.
Apart from the data storage rule, the following best practices could guide you with your backup planning:
In case of data failure, you need to know how quickly you can recover before your losses become irrecoverable (Recovery Time Objective) and how much data can you afford to lose from your last backup time (Recovery Point Objective). This helps you come up with a solid plan that ensures business continuity and disaster recovery.
Businesses store all kinds of data every day. But which data is critical to your business recovery? Your backup plan should prioritize that first and then proceed with other data. A good cloud backup plan should outline different strategies for different kinds of data.
What’s worse than losing your data during a data loss event? Finding out that the backup data you have diligently stored is corrupted. You don’t want to be in such a position, especially after a catastrophic data loss. You need to monitor your backup process to make sure your backup operations are carried out without a glitch.
Test your backup and recovery: Testing is a great way to ensure everything works as planned when disaster strikes. Testing is a great way to identify the issues in your backup process and should be a part of your regular backup plan.
Your G Suite and Office 365 data is secure. However, there is a misconception that these don’t need any backups. Although your SaaS vendors are responsible for providing the backup infrastructure, they do not guarantee the safety of your data or take accountability for any financial losses resulting from it. Make sure your backup plan has a strategy for your SaaS data as well.
