Don’t Neglect These 3 Data Backup Essentials

Having consistent access to data is what drives business. If you can’t access mission-critical data, then you experience what’s called downtime, which drives profits into the ground. Therefore, you need to keep your data safe, especially if you want your company’s future to be prosperous. Therefore, you need data backup and disaster recovery.

Here are three best practices that can help your organization get the most out of your data backup and disaster recovery solution.

Always Keep RTO and RPO in Mind
These two terms are associated with how much data that you want to restore, as well as the actual time it takes to perform the restore. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that tape isn’t conducive to optimizing either of these. Tape backups can take hours or even days to restore, depending on how big your infrastructure is, since it takes a backup of everything. Plus, tape backups can only feasibly be done after-hours, since they are so resource-intensive. Unfortunately, this leaves you vulnerable to up to a day’s worth of data loss in a worst-case scenario. Clearly, tape backup can’t meet the standards that your business needs from a data backup and disaster recovery solution.

Having BDR as part of your company’s business continuity plan allows your organization to meet its recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), by eliminating downtime and ensuring that you can recover as much data as possible. BDR is a fantastic tool that can significantly improve your company’s chances of future success, since an organization that cannot recover their data is at much greater risk of going out of business than one that has direct access to their backed-up files.

Store Backups in Multiple Locations
What would you do if your organization were to experience severe weather that threatened to destroy your physical infrastructure? Evacuating the building of personnel beforehand is a top priority, but it’s impractical to also evacuate your digital assets.

Therefore, you want to have your data backed up and stored in multiple locations. You’ll be in rough shape if you store your data in only one location (like your office) and something happens to it. What would you do if the location of your backups, as well as your office, were to be hit by the same disaster? BDR stores your backups on-site, off-site, and in a secure data center to ensure that you’ll always have access to a copy of your data.

Take Plenty of Backups
Tape backup tends to only work once per day, specifically because your network will be too burdened if you tried to take more than one backup during normal office hours. The possibility of losing an entire day’s worth of work is a threat, especially since tape backup isn’t an automatic solution and relies on employees executing it properly.

BDR, on the other hand, can take backups as often as every fifteen minutes. This means that it’s you’ll be restoring data that’s up-to-date, keeping data loss to a minimum in the event of a disaster. BDR also allows your organization to restore directly to a network device, which means you don’t have to immediately replace damaged hardware to be able to get back to work. Instead, BDR will provide you with a comfortable amount of time to get your assets in order and to shop around for replacement hardware.

Data backup and disaster recovery is something that cannot be taken lightly. If your organization is suffering from a lack of backup and disaster recovery, reach out to Computerware at (703) 821-8200. We’ll help your organization take the first steps toward minimizing downtime and improving business continuity.