How Are Your Protecting Your Collaborative Data?

As the cloud has increased in popularity, companies have moved a lot of their computing off of their local networks to cloud-hosted environments. Because of this trend, it’s become an extremely popular choice for data backup and disaster recovery solutions. In fact, it’s the preferred use of cloud-hosted systems, but unless you know why these types of environments are great for data backup and disaster recovery, you might not realize its full potential for backup and collaboration.

First, it’s important to note that public cloud resources tend to be managed and maintained by their service provider rather than the customer. This might mean that they provide data backup and disaster recovery as part of their recurring monthly service. While the redundancy provided by these solutions might be nice, if your organization relies on cloud-based data, you’ll have to think about more comprehensive ways to protect your infrastructure. The ideal solution is an Enterprise Cloud Redundancy Plan, and it could make a world of difference if your business ever does face some type of operational interruption.

One technique that some businesses use to create redundancy with their cloud resources is by using multiple cloud servers. The top cloud providers out there generally provide more than one option for where to store data. If your cloud provider doesn’t offer this dynamic service, you can instead do so by working with multiple vendors (though this complicates your vendor situation considerably). If you have more copies of your backed-up data stored off-site, you can improve your odds of being able to survive a disaster.

Another part of an Enterprise Cloud Redundancy Plan is to maintain and manage an infrastructure that can facilitate efficient data restoration. Cloud management software from cloud vendors like VMware, Microsoft, and BMC provide organizations with tools needed to keep their businesses protected and efficient. Thanks to monitoring, your cloud-based resources can be more reliable, minimizing downtime. Unfortunately, there will inevitably be some downtime, but redundancy isn’t really an issue when files are backed up frequently.

To help you better understand some of the terminology surrounding data backup and disaster recovery, we’ve put together a short list:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is measured in time--specifically, how long your business’ redundancy can go for without an update. The more data you need to recover in order to function, the higher the RPO your organization has.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is also measured in time, but it looks at how quickly you can recover from a loss incident. If you have a high RTO, you can go for much longer without restoring data.
• Recovery Level Objective (RLO): RLO is measured in granularity. If your RLO is high, your recovery process is going to be more intricate.

By understanding these data recovery terms, you can find the best recovery plan for your business’ needs. It’s critical that you understand how these terms fit into your service level agreement (SLA), as well as your organization’s responsibilities regarding the data recovery process. Of course, the best backup and disaster recovery system is one that never needs to be used, but you should never discount the peace of mind having a quality one in place.

Horne & Benik can help your business with a Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution that best suits your organization’s continuity needs. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 499-4400.