September 8, 2021
This article was originally published in February of 2018.
Business data is essential to a company’s continued success, and preserving that data is, therefore, just as important. If your data center hardware fails, if a cryptolocker attack occurs, if someone in the company makes a foolish mistake, the only way to recover lost data is with a reliable backup solution. Consider that only 21% of businesses have a contingency plan in the event of a ransomware attach, and only 11% can recover crucial data and apps within three days after the attack. Yet, as important as backup technology is, it can be a challenge for companies to deploy, maintain, and regularly test their backup solution. By not doing so, they put their whole company at risk. For these reasons and more, companies ranging from the SMB to the enterprise are turning to a managed backup approach by partnering with a reliable managed service provider.
Consider that only 21% of businesses have a contingency plan in the event of a ransomware attack, and only 11% can recover crucial data and apps within three days after the attack. Do you have the tools and knowledge to set your business or org apart?
Here, we’ll walk through the essential components of a good backup strategy and the value behind using a managed service provider to support your backup solution.
What Makes a Backup Solution Reliable?
It’s no accident that we keep using the term “reliable backup solution” in this article. Simply put, not every backup strategy is effective, and one day when the backups are needed, they turn out to be corrupted, lost, or incomplete. That’s worse than not having invested in a backup strategy at all.
So, the hallmarks of a reliable data backup strategy are as follows:
- Onsite Backups: When data is lost, recovery should occur as quickly as possible. The best way to accomplish this is by having backup copies on-site and ready to go.
- Offsite Backups: Only having onsite backups leaves you vulnerable. Should some disaster strike your main office, your only backup copies might become damaged or inaccessible. Store another copy of your data offsite in a colocation or cloud.
- Optimized Backup Schedule: Backing up data is an ongoing process. It does not need to occur every moment of every day, but your backups should follow a strategic schedule based on your needs. Check out our blog article on just a few backup rotation schemes for more information.
- Backup Testing: You must test your backups regularly to ensure they are accurate and accessible. Furthermore, your team should have regular training on how to locate and restore backup data quickly to reduce downtime.
- Organized Storage System: Older tape-based backup solutions create a physical artifact that must be stored and organized. Over time, these artifacts are sure to accumulate. You must devise a clear and organized storage scheme to make sure the right tape is easy to locate.
Cryptolocker and Ransomware Attacks
It is worth noting that cryptolocker and ransomware attacks are becoming quite common in the data security world. Both these terms refer to the same kind of attack. A virus enters your network and encrypts portions or all of your data. From there, it demands a substantial payment, usually in a cryptocurrency, to unlock your data or it will simply delete everything.
If you pay, sometimes you receive the encryption key, sometimes you don’t. But, the one reliability here is that a backup circumvents this whole process. Your IT team can simply restore your environment to a backup before the encryption. You may lose a short window of data, but with a reliable solution and strategic backup schedule, the cost/benefit should fall in your favor.
Challenges in Keeping Up with Backups
The last element of a good backup strategy is speed. How quickly can you access and restore your data in the event of a crisis? That answer partly depends on the type of backup solution in use. Disk backup is faster than tape, and in some cases, faster than the cloud. However, the other half of the speed equation depends on your team.
IT departments often struggle to maintain their data backup solution for a variety of reasons, but negligence is rarely one. Small IT departments have a wide range of responsibilities distributed to only a handful of professionals. It is easy for something as regimented and reactionary as data backups to fall by the wayside. There is always going to be something more immediately pressing to attend to in the environment. Furthermore, these factors may make it that much more difficult to maintain your collocated offsite backups.
How Managed Backups Solve these Issues
A managed backup solution from Mindsight proves to be a direct remedy to these issues. With Mindsight, we can take on the responsibility of deploying, supporting, executing, and testing your backup solution for you. Then, should the day come when backups are needed, the Mindsight team can mobilize to restore your data as quickly as possible.
- Cutting-Edge Technologies: Mindsight partners with leading backup and accessibility technology developers to ensure that your backup solution meets your needs.
- Highly Certified Experts: 90% of our engineers have advanced certifications.
- 24/7/365 Reliability: Our team is standing by at all hours ready to restore any lost or corrupted data.
In the end, managed backup proves to be a simpler solution to an important and complex challenge.
About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.
