7 Best Practices for World Backup Day
In honor of World Backup Day on March 31, The VAR Guy gathered some expert tips from vendors as well as a few of our own suggestions to help you protect your enterprise data from bad actors, natural disaster and other unforeseen circumstances.
![7 Best Practices for World Backup Day 7 Best Practices for World Backup Day](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt7ef6c86841f7875b/6538ebe2b8725a67864bc173/ThinkstockPhotos-515855200_0.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
So you want to implement a backup solution for your business — but which one do you choose? There are a number of different options for how to back up your data, according to Acronis, including Mirror Backup, Full Backup, Incremental Backup and Differential Backup.
Once you choose the method that is best for your business, then you can focus on where to store your data and create a formal disaster recovery plan.
Every company should have a data protection policy (DLP) in place to standardize their backup processes, according to Sophos. Part of this includes being aware of the industry and government regulations that can affect your organization. For instance, a company with sensitive personal health data for patients will need to be cognizant of HIPAA, while companies with clients from Europe are required to adhere to the EU Data Protection Regulation.
It's just as important to be able to restore your data to its proper place as it is to back it up in the first place, according to Carbonite.
In a recent study of CIOs, Veeam Software determined that not being able to meet increasing demand for mobile access to information and applications can cost companies up to $16 million per year. Additionally, service level agreements for recovery time objectives average 1.6 hours, but actually take an average of three hours to complete.
Veeam also found that the average SLA for recovery point objectives is 2.9 hours, but in reality this takes more than four hours to be delivered, on average.
Having multiple backup solutions in place can help to reduce or eliminate lengthy downtime in case of a disaster. The average length of downtime is increasing, according to Veeam, with a reported 15 unplanned downtime events in 2015 compared to 13 unplanned events in 2014.
Even big data initiatives need to have proper backup protocol in place in case of failover, according to Rama Kolappan, head of Information and Mobility Management at CommVault. Failure to back up your big data initiatives might be costly and complex, but failing to do so could spell doom for your organization.
Enterprises can replace traditional backups with active archiving solutions that create natively available secondary copies such as REST, FS and APIs, according to CommVault. For companies looking to reduce their workload impact, CommVault suggests reducing the number of backup copy windows through intelligent incremental capture for files and applications.
Only backup the data you absolutely need, and get rid of the rest, according to Carbonite. The recovery process will be much easier if the system doesn't have to also restore mountains of useless or outdated files.
Only backup the data you absolutely need, and get rid of the rest, according to Carbonite. The recovery process will be much easier if the system doesn't have to also restore mountains of useless or outdated files.
It’s well known that the average downtime for an enterprise company can cause millions of dollars in lost revenue, and for small businesses, a major outage can even be catastrophic. That’s why it’s critical that every business implement some kind of backup strategy to protect their assets in case of an emergency.
In honor of World Backup Day on March 31, The VAR Guy gathered some expert tips from vendors to help you protect your enterprise data from bad actors, natural disasters and other unforeseen circumstances.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like