No business likes high running costs, especially when it is a service that you hope you will never use. A professional Backup and recovery solution can be an expense, but done incorrectly or on the cheap, can be catastrophic for your business. A typical statement we and I guess many other IT services provider often hear is… “We can backup to Dropbox, Google, Amazon for cheaper or even free.” You will be right; you can typically replicate your data to a big cloud service provider for cheap. However, we are not comparing apples to apples. These solutions are a raw computing resource, which needs a framework around them to become a viable backup solution, never mind a Backup and Recovery or Business Disaster Recover (BDR) solution.

Do you keep multiple versions of the backups?

Does today’s backup overwrite last night’s backup? What would happen if you needed to recover a file that deleted a couple of days, weeks or months ago? A good BDR solution will keep multiple backups, protecting against accidental deletions that have gone un-noticed. They can safeguard the business against malware and ransomware.

How are the backups managed?

At the beginning of the blog post, I referred to these cheaper cloud solutions, as a raw computing resource. Just like electricity that is readily available in our homes and business, you need an electronic appliance to manage the power into something useful! If a backup solution is labour intensive, then over time it will fail to deliver when needed. A good backup solution will include the software that implements, manages, monitors, tests and recovers the backups. No backup solution is a fire and forget, a human casting their eye over the process is always desirable.

Where and how are your backups stored?

Is your company data sensitive? Kind of silly questions, yes of course it is! Although, is it sensitive that it should not leave your country or stored on public cloud services? Some organisations are regulated where they can hold their data by government and professional bodies. A professional Business Disaster and Recovery (BDR) solution will give you options for the physical location of offsite backups. They may give you dedicated hardware, and they will ensure your backups are encrypted in physical secure location such as data centre.

Does it protect against local onsite failures?

It is okay backing up offsite to the cloud, but what happens when you need to recover all of your backups quickly? Is your internet connection quick enough to download them? What if your hardware failed, how long will it take to receive delivery of new equipment, setup time and do you have the spare cash to pay for the unexpected? Is there a cost to recover data from your cloud provider? Belts and braces method is the best approach to backup and recovery solutions. You should be able to recover from local office backups and your cloud platform. The backup and recovery solution should come with the ability to emulate your failed office server or NAS quickly.

Are your backups accessible from the cloud?

Can you view your files within your backups? Can you open them or run them from the cloud? What about a database that requires an application to access the information? What about complete server backup, can you spin your server up within the cloud? A backup and recovery platform should have the ability to access the data within the cloud without needing to download them.

What are the recovery processes and how long will they take?

Recovering a couple of deleted files or even entire set of company data should be a relatively straightforward process. What if the underlying hardware such as the servers or network storage device has a major fault? What if the entire office is out of action? How long will they take and how long can your business wait for the recovery process to complete? A good backup and recovery solution with Disaster Recovery Plan will cover and test these scenarios. It will provide your business with a step by step guide on how to recover and estimated times. Backup is only one-half of the story with a simple plot line. The second half of the story is rather more complicated when it comes to recovery. If you like to find out more about Backup and Recovery solutions for your businesss, please contact David or Jamie on 0131 225 2215 or info@dunedinit.co.uk