7 Questions You Need To Know About Data Backup Strategy| Zmanda Blogs

7 Questions You Need To Know About Data Backup Strategy

Data backup strategy: do you have a plan for your vital data? If not, then it’s high time. Data backup is a must to keep your modern business operations up and running! Whether working on projects using your laptop or desktop, transferring information to clients and teams, or conducting online sales, you create quite a bit of data daily. If anything goes wrong, such as a power outage, a ransomware attack, or a network failure, you will lose your vital data in seconds. Thus, creating a data backup strategy is the need of the hour.

Data loss or data breach can bring a successful business down. According to the Gartner report in 2020, 60 percent of digital businesses will suffer major service failures due to the inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk.

It is always crucial to plan the data backup strategy or develop a disaster recovery plan (DRP) to avoid such failures:

Planning should include the following essential points:

• Types of data you need to back up
• Storage capacity
• The privacy/risk involved
• Budget to protect the data
• GDPR Rules

A data backup strategy is vital for your business. But before you implement one, ask these important questions to develop a data backup strategy that is secure, effective, and well capable of protecting your important business information.

Questions On Data Backup Strategy

1. Is Your Data Important?

The answer is straight, yes, data is essential. Data like delicate consumer information, or comprehensive databases, require redundant data backups and must extend back several periods. Encryption is a must in the event of an attempted breach to keep the data secure.

First determine how regularly you need to back up your data, and what kind of security the data backups require. With regular data backups, you can retrieve the most recent data updates.

2. How much Data do You Need to Backup?

How much data do you need to backup? The type of data doesn’t matter yet. Thus, determine the total amount of data.

That number matters as it will give you an idea of how much total backup space you need. Let’s not assume a 1-to-1 ratio. The general rule is that for every one terabyte of original data you have, you would need 4–5 terabytes of backup space.

3. What Will Be Planned Data Recovery Time?

A crashed hard drive usually doesn’t affect the data recovery time. If you have another computer system in the office, then you can retrieve the backup data using the secondary system. However, during an event of a natural disaster such as a fire or flooding, you will need new hardware. That means you will need some time to reinstall applications, software, updates, and data.

Consider having a robust backup and recovery solution ready to handle such events, as it will significantly reduce the data recovery time. You also have an option to partner with an outsourced managed IT solutions provider that can create a customized data backup recovery strategy that will suit your needs.

4. What Type Of Equipment Will Backup The Data?

What is your plan? To use a data backup provider, or taking care of the backup equipment yourself? If you are planning to go with the latter option, you will need to acquire several backup devices and backup media, and it’s better if you move the backups to a secure, offsite location each day.

Again, you can eliminate much of this hassle by using open source databases backup and recovery strategies and data recovery experts that automate the backup process and store your data in an offsite location.

5. When Will You Schedule The Backups?

The end of the day is the ideal time to schedule the backups as all updates to the day’s data will be completed. This process will put less of a strain on the overall system throughout the day to wait until no one, or very few people, are utilizing the system. Otherwise, there could be productivity slowdown.

However, you would prefer to back up certain types of data on a consistent schedule throughout the day. This is only possible with more advanced data backup systems.

6. Will You Store Data Backups Offsite?

Based on some of the above information, you might probably have concluded that storing backups offsite is a good idea. An onsite backup system is of no use if that system is also destroyed in a disaster?

7. Are You Subject to Any Regulatory Requirements?

If your business is subject to compliance rules, there might be limitations with your data backup options. For instance, you may not be able to use offsite backups, or you may need to ensure there is a specific level of security in play first.

In case you violate the compliance rules, it will cost you a bomb. The last thing to do is to go through all the work of developing a backup strategy just to discover you have left yourself open to a regulatory fine.

Wrap-Up!

While there are certainly other aspects to planning a robust data backup strategy, while answering the above questions, you will have a good idea of what you need to do and how best to keep your data protected. If you are looking for a comprehensive data backup solution for your vital data. Go for Zmanda, our backup and disaster recovery solution will ensure your data is safe and will keep your business up and running!