You Can’t Afford Not to Have a Proper Backup Solution

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. This is what it means to believe in Murphy’s Law, a rather bleak and somewhat nihilistic view of how the world works. Unfortunately, when it comes to your business’ important data, you have to subscribe to this mindset in order to prepare yourself for the worst-case scenario. Every business has its differences, but the end result will remain largely the same--a data backup system customized to fit your organization’s specific needs.

We’ll walk you through five steps to put together the ideal data backup solution for your business.

Determining Your Backup Needs
First, you need to figure out what you hope to gain from your data backup system. After all, you can’t implement a solution without first knowing what you want from it. Doing so is crucial to narrowing down your options so that only the most helpful ones remain. It’s also critical that you never sell your own needs short. Don’t settle for a solution that ultimately won’t work somewhere down the road--your organization’s future is worth more than that.

The industry your organization is a part of will largely influence the type of backup solution that you’ll choose. If you’re in a rapidly growing industry, for example, you’ll need a backup solution that can rapidly restore a large amount of data quickly, regardless of the file format. If you have particularly important data, you should make an effort to prioritize its safety with a specialized solution. You should also consider online threats and vulnerabilities which might hamper your organization’s ability to restore this data. Be prepared to put together a list of security, usability, and reliability standards that you want your organization to benefit from in a backup solution.

Determine Your Budget
Once you’ve figured out your baseline needs, you can know for sure that you’ll be looking only at the best solutions that fit your specific needs. Depending on the solution you choose, you’ll be looking at a variety of different options at various price points. Again depending on your choice, you might also have to factor in employee training, as a solution that’s not automatic will need to be run by your workers. You might be tempted to minimize investment into this, but we urge you to not do so here. Your business’ future is on the line, and a subpar backup solution certainly isn’t doing it any favors. You could be risking everything by trying to cut costs, which could lead to a larger investment in recovering from downtime. While a data backup solution doesn’t directly earn you any profits, it keeps you from spending more than necessary in a worst-case scenario.

Selecting a Platform
Just a few short years ago, a backup could have been something as simple as a hard drive or a tape that had a copy of your business’ data on it. Nowadays, there are much more dynamic options available. Instead of a hard drive, you might instead choose to store your data backups in the cloud for easy access in the event of a loss incident. More than ever before, organizations are considering a hybrid cloud solution that entails using a software-based backup in conjunction with a cloud-based system, allowing for a dynamic and practically guaranteed way to access data in the event of a loss scenario.

Making Your Recovery Plan
A data backup plan is no good if you don’t know how to initiate the recovery step. You should have a detailed plan put in place that’s clear and concise enough that anyone is able to handle the task. This also needs to include important information, like which data should be prioritized and what comes after the restoration. Everyone who has a role to play in the backup and disaster recovery process should be privy to these important details.

Test Your Backups
If you don’t test your backups, you run the risk of them not working at a time when you need them most. To keep this from happening, you should frequently test your backups so that you know for certain that they have the highest chance of succeeding. You’ll want to make sure not only that it works, but that it can restore your data successfully. This is the perfect opportunity to make sure that your employees know how it works as well.

Horne & Benik can equip your business with the ideal backup and disaster recovery solution. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 499-4400.