Backup Planning? Here are 4 Tips

There are many ways to back up and store your data, but the importance of having a good data backup system in place for your business can’t be overstated. Are you thinking about changing your backups or enhancing your backup planning? Here are some tips to help you as you work through your decisions.

All Cloud Backups Are Not Created Equal

Cloud technology is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the IT industry, but that doesn’t mean all clouds can be compared at a one-to-one ratio. While Dropbox or Microsoft’s OneDrive can be helpful for passing and storing larger files for clients or certain teams to access intermittently, they are not automated well. Even if you set up the automatic backup functions in these tools, you could be missing important documents or creating opportunities for a power disruption to cause data loss.

When you are looking into cloud-based strategies, you not only need to be thorough in your exploration of the tool and its specifications, but you also have to think about the type of data you are storing, who has access to it, and what needs (if any) may change in the long- or short-term.

Think about Your People

How do your employees and teams store their work? Most employees tend to store data on their desktops for easy access. And in the world of remote work, this can be especially dangerous. Unsecured internet connections, changing devices, and other remote workflow changes can put that desktop data at higher risk for corruption, loss, and theft.

Your backup planning must include your workers’ habits, if not their preferences. Because choosing to implement backup systems that bypass your employees’ workflow will mean you have unsecured and unsaved data floating around in places where it can be lost or stolen.

Think about How Your Data Moves

Does every department use the same types of files? Do they communicate data changes and updates in the same ways – email, chat, intranet?

While you are thinking about how individual employees access and manage their company data, you also need to take a step back and look at how teams interact within themselves and with other departments, too. Having a clean and organized file storage system (with cloud or other backups) is a great idea, it’s not going to help you if your teams work exclusively in emails or other outside-the-system ways. At best, you have some disorganized files. At worst, your teams could lose a whole lot of collaborative project work should a breach or disaster occur.

Know Your Data Backups and Audit Them Regularly

If you have current backup planning or technology in place, you should be familiar with how it works, when it runs, and what data is being backed up when it’s running. Creating a blueprint for what data is backed up and where it is stored can help you identify problems or gaps in your data backup plans.

If knowing is half the battle, the other half is double-checking the work. While any good data backup system can and should run on its own once the automation is set up to meet your preferences, industry best practices, and compliance requirements, there’s still a whole world of unknowns to account for. You can circumvent backup problems by creating and executing a regular data check schedule. If your big backups are on a regular schedule (monthly, quarterly, daily), you should have backup audits in place at a frequency that is proportional to the size of those backups. You can do a dummy restore to simulate data or power loss so as to make sure your programs are running effectively if and when a real disaster occurs.

Verve is Your Backup Planning Support

Verve IT is a service firm that deals in managed IT and much more. That’s why we pride ourselves on providing world-class support from highly relational local staff. From 24/7 monitoring and alerting to onsite, mobile device, and cloud support, Verve is here to be your backup’s backup.

Verve is IT, simplified. Learn more about our managed IT services, or give us a call today at 209-244-7120.