5 Essential Practices for Secure Cloud Backup & Recovery

UPDATED: March 4, 2024

While a backup solutions are necessary for any business, utilizing the right strategy for your business will ensure business continuity. There are tell-tale signs that your backup strategy is the most secure and effective for your business. But taking the time to create a solid backup plan and optimize it for success is the challenge. We've simplified the process by giving you 5 best practices that make sure you backup and disaster recovery plan is the best it can be. 

Major data losses can happen at any time without warning — which means that without a reliable backup and disaster recovery plan, your data will be as good as lost forever. This may sound dauting, but it is a sad reality in a system where digital storage devices are prone to software bugs, human error, hardware failure, power failure, physical damage, and data corruption and hacking. You may not realize the importance of your data until you lose it - so make sure you're performing regular backups. This means at minimum quarterly, although monthly is better. 

If you don't, you will need to pay for expensive and time consuming recovery services that in some cases do not guarantee a complete, if any, data recovery.

What is data recovery?

Data recovery is the process of retrieving and repairing data that has been lost on your storage devices like a hard drive, USB, RAID or SSD devices. While it is possible to recover your data completely, it is also possible to recover only part of the data, or none at all, especially when a system is highly damaged or corrupted. Usually, the process involves hiring a specialist or simply using software. However, the method that is used depends on how the data was lost.

5 Benefits of Having a Solid Backup Strategy in Place

While you can't control what happens to your business, you can control how your business reacts. An effective data backup and recovery strategy not only saves your business from losing important data, but also offers the following benefits: 

1. Scalable Security
2. Reduced Risk of Revenue Loss
3. Easy Manageability
4. Dependable Data Replication
5. Rare Business Disruption

When you have a well-thought-out plan established for data backup and recovery, you're ensuring business continuity that transcends the unforeseen events that would ordinarily jeopardize it. Should you decide to forgo coming up with a backup strategy or simply push it off your to-do list, you could be left to defend your business from way more than cyberattacks or outages. 

Top 5 Practices to ensure you have a Reliable and Secure backup strategy in place 

Without a carefully composed data backup and recovery strategy, your business is subject to its threats. 

Traditional backups are no longer sufficient to safeguard a business' most valuable asset. It's critical to adopt a cutting-edge strategy that protects your organization's most valuable asset or you could risk costly downtime.

If you experience an outage or data loss, it is not the time to question whether your disaster recovery solution is functional. You need to know that anything that claims to protect the heart of your business will do so.  

How does one ensure a reliable, effective backup solution? It starts with keeping track of what's working and what isn't. Running routine tests and monitoring logs regularly for data lapses will keep you informed about the effectiveness of your data backup and recovery solution. 

Backup products that focus on providing backup solutions alone can mislead businesses. Legacy backup products don't consider threats in the modern era, resting on often outdated systems to provide backup solutions. Businesses need a solution that is not only updated and assumes the worst, but also ensures swift recovery after a disaster. 

The most important things when it comes to data recovery is the time it takes between the moment of disaster and restoration, whereby the system begins to resume working (recovery time objective or RTO) and in case of a disaster, how much work is lost without affecting the continuity of the business (recovery point objective or RPO).

These two issues are measured in terms of minutes, hours or days; and the shorter time they take, the better it would be for your business. This depends on the type of cloud disaster recovery that you choose. For instance, cold site is a data center that is either virtual or physical whereby regular backups can be reinstated to the sleeping servers. It has longer RTO/RPO values which makes it cheaper and common among SMBs. A warm site, which is internet based and uses more infrastructures, has a reduced RP/RTO time (to minutes) and costs slightly more than the cold site. There is the geographically dispersed high availability site that uses advanced DNS and provides instant backups in real- time.

Nowadays, there are more malware and ransomware threats than legacy solutions can account for. 

Despite the ability to detect known threats through traditional anti-virus software, a ransomware blocker makes it possible to identify ransomware strains that have never been seen before. Ultimately, the result is a data shield that keeps all of your information secure against growing perils.

Business operations require comprehensive security of the entire IT infrastructure (physical systems, virtual systems, cloud services, and mobile devices). This means implementing a backup solution that integrates several advanced security-oriented technologies.

With every aspect of your IT infrastructure considered, you can be confident that in unforeseen events your data is protected on all fronts.

The truth is, it's not just about creating a secure, complete backup. It's also important to have a reliable, accessible copy stored off-site. By leveraging the cloud, secure data off-site can be used to optimize a backup.

The current information technology trend that is highly promoted has everything to do with cloud services. Unfortunately, this is also an area that is marred by misinformation just like any other new concept. Despite all this, its use has not been overshadowed and this is why more and more companies and businesses are starting to leverage cloud services.

When companies switch to cloud services from on-premises infrastructure, they can move their data, applications, and operations to the remote server. Setting up a cloud environment requires an evaluation of security and performance needs, reorganization, and some purchasing decisions. The result is the confidence that in events where data has the potential to be compromised, it is still accessible and in your hands. 

Additionally, there are more cloud disaster recovery benefits compared to the conventional methods. With the cloud, recovery time is greatly reduced and the process is cost effective compared to the conventional tape backup. Another thing is that you can adjust the costs and performance of your disaster recovery platform in the cloud whereby you can decide to move priority systems and leave the less important ones to reduce cost.

secure your business with A holistic data backup strategy 

By implementing these core elements of the foundation of data backup and recovery, you provide your business with a solution that stays ahead of the curve with cutting-edge security features built-in at every stage. Enhance data security with solutions that work in tandem with other defenses, incorporate off-site storage, and have a modern solution that can handle today's data threats.

Planning to implement a backup and disaster recovery solution to protect your data, reduce revenue, and limit productivity losses in the event of an outage or attack?

Getting in touch with Centre Technologies is the first step in securing your data.