Speed trials
One aspect of online backup that’s easily overlooked is upstream bandwidth. If you have dozens of computers all regularly backing up their data to the cloud, your internet connection could get swamped.
You don’t necessarily need an ultrafast connection, however. Your cloud backup solution may need to send a very large amount of data up the line while it’s creating the initial backups of protected systems, but after that only new and changed items will be uploaded, which should be far smaller. To further speed things up, most vendors offer vault-seeding services; these involve backing everything up on your premises to removable drives, which are then couriered to the data centre to form the basis of your cloud backup set.
Another thing you should consider is how quickly you need to be able to restore your data in the event of a disaster – a measurement known as your recovery time objective (RTO). If your local and online backup provisions aren’t fast enough to meet your RTOs, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. It might make sense to define more than one RTO, as a host running core Exchange services will have a much shorter RTO than one providing basic file-sharing services.
Remotely safe
When the pandemic struck, many businesses had to make an abrupt, unplanned switch to homeworking, and it’s understandable if they didn’t have suitable backup processes in place on day one. A year on, though, there’s no excuse: your backup and recovery strategy needs to go beyond the office network.
Admittedly, on-premises backup systems don’t lend themselves well to homeworking. It’s rarely feasible to put a backup appliance in every home, and asking workers to use a VPN to connect to central storage means an extra management burden, not to mention slow performance.
There are, however, some good cloud-based solutions. The best backup options let you deploy a remote agent to homeworkers’
“A strategy that relies on someone remembering to hit the ‘backup’ button is guaranteed to fail at some point”
Automatic pilot
The final requirement for secure backups is that you have to ensure that they actually run on a regular basis: a data protection strategy that relies on someone remembering to hit the “backup” button is guaranteed to fail at some point. Look for fully automated solutions, with scheduling features that allow them to run jobs regularly at your preferred times.
As for what these times should be, that depends on your recovery point objective (RPO). Where the RTO is determined by how long you can get by without your critical data, your RPO reflects how much data you can afford to lose – which in turn should tell you how frequently to back up your data. For example, if it would be a catastrophe for you to lose the last four hours of transactions then daily backup jobs won’t be enough.
Even once your data protection strategy is up and running, don’t think you can set and forget it. You must regularly test it to confirm that all targets are being successfully backed up, that your desired RTOs and RPOs remain achievable and that any unforeseen problems are ironed out before you need to recover from a real disaster.
There’s no escaping the fact that getting your backups in order involves a certain investment of time and money. Compared to the cost of a data disaster, though, it’s an absolute bargain. Read on to find the hybrid backup solution that could well save your business.