3 Tips to Get the Most From Your Data Backup

Business owners require ubiquitous access to certain information stored on their organization’s infrastructure. Thus, there’s an immediate need to safeguard this data from any sort of impending destruction. We’ll discuss ways that you can prevent the worst when it seems like your data will fall victim to a loss incident.

Here are three of the best ways your organization can protect its most critical asset: its data.

Have a RTO and RPO in Mind
This has to do with the amount of data that you want to restore, as well as how quickly you plan on restoring it. With tape backup, you could take a backup of your entire infrastructure, which could take several hours or even days to restore in the event of a disaster. Furthermore, the tape might not even be as recent as you would like, which brings into question the backup system’s ability to get you back into operation with minimal data loss. Thus, tape fails to meet the requirements you put into place for your backup solution.

With a BDR, as part of your business continuity plan, you can ensure that you meet your recovery time objective (RTO) and your recovery point objective (RPO), optimizing your business’s ability to dodge downtime. This is why BDR is such a valuable tool for a business that wants to prolong its life cycle. Remember, a business that fails to recover their data following a data loss incident is likely to go out of business within a year.

Keep Multiple Copies of Your Data
Let’s say that your office building is struck by a flash flood. You evacuate the building before anyone gets hurt, but you still feel forlorn that everything that you’ve worked so hard for is getting destroyed by something that you couldn’t predict. You could have prevented your business’s data being completely wiped out.

This exact scenario is why it’s important to not only have multiple copies of your data, but to store them in different locations as well. If you store your data backups on-site, and your infrastructure becomes subject to a disaster or hacking incident, where can you go for a solid backup of your data? Any good BDR solution will store your backups both on-site and in a secure data center for quick access in the event of a disaster, minimizing downtime.

Take Frequent Backups
In the old days of tape backup, you could only take one backup every day. Furthermore, since the backup was so resource-intensive, you would have to wait until the end of the day to do it. This meant that you could lose out on an entire day’s worth of work, and furthermore, you’re relying on mistake-prone human beings to set the tape and start the backup. This isn’t the ideal way to handle such a critical task.

Instead, you want to take backups of your data at least as often as every fifteen minutes. Doing so means that you’re always using the most up-to-date version of your data possible, and that you’ll minimize data loss in the event of a disaster. BDR can accomplish this impressive feat, and can rapidly restore data directly to the BDR device, effectively eliminating downtime while you order replacement hardware.

If your business is ready to start taking data backup seriously, we highly recommend a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution from Directive. With it, your data will be safe and secure, and you’ll be taking an important first step toward achieving business continuity. To learn more, reach out to us at 607.433.2200.