As modern businesses grow increasingly digital and data-driven, the need for companies to employ an efficient data backup and disaster recovery solution increases. Even the most advanced hardware and operating systems can crash, and even the most well-trained employees can at times make costly errors. Furthermore, disasters such as system outages, data breaches, and ransomware attacks from bad actors can strike anytime.
Companies with poorly developed or nonexistent data protection strategies run the risk of losing massive amounts of critical business information when they least expect it. To safeguard their companies’ hard-earned profits and good reputation, as well as their own peace of mind, it’s essential for business owners to establish a solid ransomware protection and disaster recovery plan before the worst happens. These systems are what allow companies to speedily recover their computer data in the event of corruption or deletion.
Here are some key steps businesses can take to establish a solid disaster recovery strategy:
Invest in Increasing Your Storage Capacity
The amount of digital data contemporary businesses use, process, and store is growing by leaps and bounds each year. Accumulated email and marketing content alone can usually amount to multiple gigabytes of data for many companies. As a result, modern businesses are under increasing pressure to figure out cost-efficient ways to store terabytes of data securely and manage data growth over time.
Depending on the nature of your business and your company’s specific needs, your data storage may need to follow certain compliance or data protection regulations. These compliance issues should be part of your disaster recovery strategy.
Decide Where to Store Your Data
Many companies traditionally store their data on independent external drives, on offsite servers set apart from their main business servers, in the cloud, or a combination. Some companies, for example, may house their full backups on offsite or cloud-based servers and use local appliances for a smaller number of especially important, frequently used files only. Having “backups of the backup” is also an important best practice to keep your company data extra safe from cyberattacks and other IT disasters.
Offsite Servers
The relative affordability of offsite servers, meanwhile, makes them an equally desirable place to store company data backups. Many providers offer massive amounts of storage at attractive prices. In many cases, the recurring cost of using these servers pales next to the convenience they afford companies looking to store critical business information safely for the long haul. Data recovery from offsite servers is also usually fast, frictionless, and extremely secure, depending on which disaster recovery solution you’re using.
Cloud-Based Solutions
Cloud-based or online backup strategies store companies’ primary data on either a public or private cloud. A third-party service provider typically hosts the server and charges client companies a fee based on the amount of bandwidth required, the storage capacity desired, or the number of users that need to access the server. Some solution providers, on the other hand, provide a solution that doesn’t nickle and dime you like service providers.
Cloud-based backup and recovery strategies have grown especially popular in recent years because they give organizations an efficient way to fortify their data protection plans without taxing their in-house IT staff further. Small-to-medium businesses and large enterprises are most likely to use cloud solutions as their primary sites for data backup and recovery. Bigger companies and organizations, meanwhile, will usually use cloud backup services as a supplementary component of a larger and more sophisticated data protection plan.
Choose State-of-the-Art Security
Corporate data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other forms of cybercrime are more prevalent than ever. Hence, wherever you choose to store your company data backups, security should be one of your top priorities. Businesses that choose to store their backups offsite and in the cloud should take special care to only partner with reputable and dependable disaster recovery solution providers or service providers. Disaster recovery solutions that has immutable backups, encrypt all data both when the information is in storage and when it’s actually being used, are ideal for guaranteeing that your data stays protected at all times.
Prioritize Ease of Use
If your organization is unable to restore crucial data sets quickly and efficiently once they go down, it could cost you dearly in profits, productivity, and reputational damage. Not having important data on hand due to IT disasters or data breaches can even get you in legal trouble if authorities demand access to company information you don’t immediately have on hand. An intelligent disaster recovery plan with an easy-to-use solution will enable you to locate and retrieve vital pieces of information with little to no lag time.
At the end of the day, an efficient disaster recovery plan is much more than a supplementary feature for any company. In today’s technology-driven business environment, your company’s survival and long-term success depend on it.
