Backups, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity
Backups are simply copies of whatever data you feel is valuable, created at a certain point in time. If the data is good at the time of the backup, the backups may be good. If the data is already corrupted, the backed-up data is corrupt data; as simple as that. If you need to restore this data, you are restoring corrupted data. If you don’t run tests to verify your backups, you will never know what you have and whether or not you can restore anything useful at all.
Disaster Recovery is a term made popular in the last few years that describes a process. That process includes not only the backup of data, but a way to continue to deliver that data to help recover from a disaster such as a broken server, a damaged network, or even our old friend, corrupted data. This is accomplished through on-site virtualization.
Business Continuity is another term, recently made popular. It refers to a plan to provide the ability to continue to stay in business no matter what. If a fire, or tornado for instance, destroys your building, AND with it your servers, AND your backups, AND your Disaster Recovery equipment, you can still be in business tomorrow because you invested in, and established a working Business Continuity plan long before the disaster occurred. This is accomplished, in part, through cloud virtualization, but also includes such things as policies and procedures detailing who does what during a business emergency. The worst time to decide these details is when your adrenaline levels are off the chart and everything and everyone around you is confused and worried about “what happens next?”
Some businesses don’t even bother with making backups. Some just create simple backups and trust in luck that they will be enough. They usually don’t even try to verify that data can actually be restored and again trust in luck that it will be available when needed.
Let’s face it; Those of us who’ve used computers for any length of time know better. Not because we’re any smarter, but because, in all likelihood, we, or someone we know, have experienced a catastrophic data loss at some point or another. We know better because we’ve been burned.
Unfortunately, it’s not until we’ve seen others’ challenges, or had that gut-wrenching experience ourselves, that we begin to realize that the cost and inconvenience of setting up a comprehensive backup solution pales in comparison to the cost and inconvenience of the data loss it could have prevented.
What are the threats that precipitate the creation of an effective data protection plan? As mentioned before, there are the uncontrollable, such as natural disasters; extreme weather, floods, fires, burglars and such. Then there are the cyber threats such as Ransomware, Viruses, Password and Data stealing Trojans, Backdoor Access Trojans, Keyloggers, Logic Bombs and Advanced Persistent Threats that hide and take up residence deep inside your network, surveilling your system, just waiting for the perfect time to unleash their payload.
Every day, the AV-TEST Institute registers over 350,000 new, dangerous, malicious programs (malware) and potentially unwanted applications (PUA) such as spyware and tracking software.
A well-designed Business Continuity policy and program can help alleviate your worry about losing your business and money to criminals or through natural disasters.
Introducing the Data Defender Plan from Networking Delaware
Why just Backup when what you really need is to stay up? ™
Our Data Defender Plan delivers solid, unadulterated, restorable backups. Through virtualization we can replace your server in minutes if something should go wrong. Our system even provides a way to securely access your data in familiar ways from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection, should that ever become necessary.
We do versioning of your data so the restores are always up to date. Snapshots can be created as often as every 30 minutes (depending on the volume of data you need to backup) so you never lose an entire day’s work.
