Business continuity is a critical element of any organization’s preparations for the future, including how comprehensive the backup is designed to be. Let’s discuss the steps that businesses—especially small ones—need to take to ensure their data is protected.
Step 1: Establish What is Needed for Business Continuity
To ensure your business continuity plan is rock solid, you must adopt a trustworthy and dedicated backup and disaster recovery tool to protect your data adequately. We’ll dig into this more in a moment.
You must also evaluate a few critical aspects of your business to see how your backup strategy needs to be shaped. What risk level do you face when dealing with ransomware and other threats? How would these threats impact your business? What amount of data could you stand to lose in a disaster, and how quickly would you be able to resume your operations?
These answers are critical to establish, as they will shape the rest of your backup preparations.
Step 2: Backup Your Data Based on Best Practices
Once you understand what needs to be backed up, you must design your backup to meet various best practices to keep it safe. Following the 3-2-1 Backup Rule—at least three copies of your data, in at least two locations, with at least one copy stored in the cloud—and ensuring they remain up-to-date, secure, and safely isolated will be greatly beneficial to you.
Step 3: Ensure Your Backups Are Safe
Speaking of safety, there are other steps that must be taken to ensure your backups are protected. First, they should be encrypted, ensuring that no outside parties can read the data stored within. You also need to ensure that all of your endpoints are protected as much as possible, because—while best practices dictate that all business data is stored centrally—there is always the chance that someone has made a mistake.
You also need to test your backups regularly, just to make sure that they are reliable. Otherwise, you could be blind to the potential fact that your backups have not successfully been saved, and out of luck if a disaster does strike.
This is a Good Starting Point… Trust Us to Help You From There
Lantek is here to assist the businesses of Pennsylvania in operating effectively and securely, including keeping their essential data safe. If you’d like to learn more about what we can do for you, reach out to us at (610) 683-6883.