We are consistently adamant that businesses have a comprehensive data backup strategy to help secure its operational continuity. The threat environment in which we find ourselves at the present time only reinforces the importance of such a backup strategy. This month we thought we’d take a few minutes to review what makes a business’ backup platform comprehensive.
Properly Designing an Effective Backup Strategy
For your data backup platform to be of any use, ensuring that it is put in correctly is key. Let’s look at three steps you need to take to get your backup strategy into a good place.
Define Your Recovery Goals
This might seem obvious, but you have to understand just how specific your organizational definitions have to be. Ultimately, the goal of your backup strategy should be to recover all your data and restore it successfully in short order. There are metrics to consider in order to accomplish this, however. How much data will it take to resume your most essential operations? How much downtime can your organization tolerate? Identifying these details will help you to recover successfully, minimizing your chances of catastrophe.
Get Your Team Up to Speed
Of course, having a backup is only one part of the equation. If your team doesn’t know how to properly implement backup strategies and restore from backup, it won’t do you much good. Training and testing your systems, and your staff, has to be on the list of priorities.
Develop (and Test) Standard Procedures
In order to get this part of the continuity plan to work, you will need to develop procedures in which to do so and you will need to test its efficacy. Obviously, we don’t want you to encourage your team to put your business in harm’s way, but there are ways to test your procedures, through staff quizzes and drills. The knowledgeable technicians at North Central Technologies can help you implement a testing strategy that will keep your backup systems working for your company.
Ultimately, having a backup in place is mandatory, but organizations that develop corresponding strategies that fit into a business continuity plan will be in a better position when the inevitable situation rears its head. If you would like more information about how to create a strong backup platform for your business, give us a call today at 978-798-6805.
