Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan? Why You Need Data Backups

Downtime is one of the most costly problems a company can face. The threat is intensified for businesses that process higher volumes of transactions, and even an hour of downtime can cost a business thousands. Clearly, getting up and running after an IT outage should be a top priority.

It's during these stressful moments that your disaster recovery plan comes into play. These procedures need to demonstrate what your company will do in the case of any downtime, addressing everything from natural disasters to server failures. Data backups will be the most important part of your plan.

How to Best Protect Your Data Through Backups

When disaster strikes, it's too late to plan your recovery or backup strategies. You must set up processes in advance, especially when it comes to integrating cloud servers or other processes into your systems.

Keep in mind that backing up on-premises data serves no purpose if the backup is also involved in a disaster. Many businesses now keep their data—or at least a backup of their data—in the cloud. Cloud providers typically store the same data in several different geographical locations, which helps them avoid redundant disasters.

Your company's disaster recovery plan will be different than another organization's. For instance, my company's disaster plans cannot tolerate downtime or losing any data. As a result, we run a complete mirroring of our infrastructure at another site. In our case, the uptime requirements for our clients justified the added expenditure to create a duplicate environment. In contrast, one of our clients lost out on a whole day's worth of data when the company was hit with ransomware.

You'll have to decide on the best course of action for your company and your customers, but most successful backup plans follow these three steps:

1. Determine which data is vital for operations.

Not all organizations need a complete backup of their server images, including the operating systems, applications and data, but it can be invaluable in cases where downtime is not an option. For e-commerce businesses, for example, a complete backup of their server images is a small price to pay to avoid even a minute of downtime during the holiday shopping season. In 2018, technical issues on Black Friday caused numerous customers to switch their e-commerce purchases to some brands' competitors.

There are two directions you can take: You can back up only your data, or you can back up the entire server in the cloud. Work with your CTO, IT department or your cloud provider to determine which processes, data and applications your company needs to operate. From there, you'll know where to prioritize your backup investments.

If you choose to only back up your data and are faced with disaster, you'll need to reinstall all operating systems and applications before you will be able to recover your data and get back to work. For leaner companies or companies that don't rely on heavy server traction or e-commerce traffic, that solution is completely fine.

If the applications that manage your data are also down, however, the data itself isn’t that useful—especially if your company operates in e-commerce or always needs to be available to customer traffic. That's when companies decide to back up entire servers and create clones of their on-premises systems that live in the cloud. If the server goes down, you simply switch to the cloud server while the physical server is restored to full functionality.

2. Decide how often backups should run.

Often, companies don't know the value of backups until it's too late. In the event of an outage, you will only be able to recover the data that was gathered from the last backup point. If your business backs up its data every Monday, for example, an outage on Friday would cause you to lose out on almost a week's worth of data.

When disaster strikes, it's too late to plan your recovery or backup strategies. You must set up processes in advance.

You'll need to decide what level of risk is acceptable and complete a cost-benefit analysis against the price of data backups. Find out how frequently your website accesses vital data and when that data is likely to change or update. Once again, you'll want to work closely with your CTO, IT department or cloud provider. Weigh the safety of the most frequent backups you'll need against the cost of uploading and storing information to a cloud storage system. Depending on your company's budget, you could need to sacrifice either data backups or storage costs.

3. Research your industry's data storage regulations.

When making storage decisions, you also will want to account for the regulatory requirements in your industry. Construction project data must typically be available for 10 years, for instance, while the Sarbanes-Oxley Act ensures that publicly traded companies retain payroll data for seven years. Consult a lawyer or other qualified professional to figure out how those laws will apply to your data storage.

If your industry doesn't have strict regulations about data storage, the best practice is to store several months’ worth of data. That amount of information makes it relatively easy to restore a system after a data disaster without requiring a massive investment in cloud storage space. At the same time, having several months of buffer enables you to reach further back in time in case malware is present in your recent backups.

All organizations should have a working disaster recovery plan—and data backups need to be a key component. If budgetary constraints limit the amount of planning you can do, spend those precious dollars backing up data and then testing these backups to ensure they function as planned. In the event of an IT outage, the ability to restore your data from a backup will minimize losses and get systems up and running in less time.

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