When disaster strikes, are you confident your business has the backups it needs to ensure its data is protected?
Believe it or not, a lot of business aren’t adequately prepared for a disaster — be it a crypto attack, server crash or human error. A lot of businesses wouldn’t know what to do or how to recover data if it just suddenly disappeared or was encrypted.
The following are some surefire steps your business can take to protect its information:
- Develop a backup strategy — A data protection strategy is made up of primarily five components: backup and recovery, remote data movement, storage system security, Data Lifecycle Management, and Information Lifecycle Management. Also, determining your RTO (recovery time objectives) and RPO (recovery point objectives) are crucial to developing a proper retention policy. To learn more about these elements of a data protection package, read this comprehensive post from TechTarget.
- Implement image-based backups — An image-based backup is a backupprocess that creates a block level copy (mirror image) of storage. This results in a complete one for one backup of your storage including the operating system (OS) and all the data associated with it, including the system state and application configurations as well as all of your applications and data. The backup is saved as a single file that is called an image.
- Test your recovery process — Preparedness is key when it comes to disaster recovery. Your business should make test restoration a mandatory criterion of your backup strategy — whether it’s a virtual boot of the image or a full restore test to alternative hardware — you’ll be happy you did.
North Shore Data Services is comprised of highly-skilled and trained IT professionals experienced capable of assisting you in developing a data recovery strategy. NSDS is also able to implement and manage an image based backup solution including off site replication for its customers utilizing Storagecraft Shadow Protect image based backups software. Contact us today by calling 978-988-0201 or by opening a ticket with our help desk at www.ns-data.com.
