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Optimizing Backup and Recovery to Safeguard Your Business  

A strong backup and recovery strategy is essential to ensuring your business can quickly restore its data in the event of a system failure, cyberattack, human error, or other catastrophic incidents. 

Backup and recovery plans help businesses protect and maintain services, applications, and operations after a cyberattack or other event in which critical customer, employee, partner, or other confidential data is compromised. Businesses operating without a solid backup and recovery plan put themselves at risk for everything from complete data loss and hardware issues to software corruption and cybercrime such as ransomware.

Backup and recovery strategies have existed since the late 1970s when computer center managers recognized the dependence many organizations had on their computer systems, but the approaches have had to mature over time as technology has evolved from strictly on-premises systems to sophisticated applications and systems that span across on-prem to the edge and beyond on the cloud. Now backup and recovery plans must include all apps. For instance, according to Gartner, Inc., “by 2028, 75% of enterprises will prioritize backup of SaaS applications as a critical requirement, compared to 15% in 2024.”

“The risk of IT outages underscores the urgent need for regular backup and recovery of critical enterprise data,” Michael Hoeck, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “As businesses are more dependent on SaaS technologies, it becomes crucial to ensure SaaS data is both protected and recoverable. Given the vulnerability of SaaS data to errors, cyberattacks, and vendor mishaps, robust backup solutions are also indispensable.”

At its most basic, a backup and recovery plan details the process of creating and storing copies of data that can be used to protect organizations against data loss across the broadest set of workloads – cloud, on-premises, and software as a service, or SaaS. As enterprise environments become more and more complex, keeping up-to-date records for backup and recovery processes becomes paramount. 

business Benefits

Backup and Recovery and the Business

Backup and recovery likely are part of many businesses’ standard operating procedures, but as the computing environment encompasses myriad distributed components, it becomes ever more important that business and IT leaders build their backup and recovery plans to deliver a few key advantages.

To start, backup and recovery plans must be constructed in such a way as to enable businesses to resume operations quickly after a disaster, such as a power outage, natural disaster, or cyberattack. Business continuity is critical to a company’s reputation before and after an incident, and leaders must be sure to devise a backup and recovery strategy that protects the businesses’ most important assets. And a speedy recovery can help businesses avoid customer dissatisfaction with the brand as well as lost revenue due to downtime, but it also can help mitigate the damage from a data breach.

For businesses in competitive markets, a strong backup and recovery plan will provide the business with a clear advantage over competitors that might not be able to recover as quickly or as fully following a catastrophic event. Brand recognition and reputation can be significantly damaged in a public data breach or natural disaster. Being the company that didn’t miss a beat during a disaster will give customers peace of mind and the brand a boost in public opinion.

Backup and recovery plans will also directly impact a company’s compliance efforts. Not only does a backup and recovery strategy help keep data protected and securely available following an incident, but it also keeps data, processes, and reporting in compliance with security audits and industry regulations. Backup and recovery plans can prevent compliance drift by keeping the organization within regulations. This will help avoid pricy penalties and legal fines incurred when out of compliance.

A good backup and recovery plan also will reduce costs for businesses. Whether it be the lack of downtime or by keeping employees productive, backup and recovery strategies can not only prevent data loss, but they can prevent revenue loss as well. That will minimize the financial impact of unexpected events and enable the business to resume operations quickly after a disaster.

Essentials

Backup and Recovery Essentials

Backup and recovery plans will differ from business to business, but there are some common components that every backup and recovery plan should have.

IT leaders creating a backup and recovery plan should first consider the frequency of backups needed for their business. How often a company backs up data, and certain types of data, is critical to the strategy because it will guarantee data isn’t lost in between backup windows. Minimizing data loss between backups will help the business recovery more fully in the event of a power outage, natural disaster, or other incident.

Backup and recovery plans also must have clearly defined recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). The RTO is the targeted duration of time between the event of a failure and the point at which operations resume, and RPO is the maximum length of time permitted from which data can be restored.
The difference between the two can be explained as RPO is the time from the last data backup until an incident occurred and RTO is the time businesses set to recover the lost data. Defining these metrics is an important element of businesses’ backup and recovery plans.

Location is another critical component to the backup and recovery plan. Backups should be stored in multiple locations, both on-site and off-site, specifically to protect against physical threats such as floods, power outages, or natural disasters.

Workload mobility is also a consideration for backup and recovery plans. Cloud workload mobility is the ability to move computing workloads between different physical and virtual environments, such as from an on-premises data center to a public cloud or between different cloud providers. Cloud-based backup and recovery can enhance workload mobilities, allowing organizations to replicate quickly and to move workloads to different regions for continuity purposes.

As with all scenarios involving propriety and sensitive data, security must be considered in any backup and recovery plan. Using encryption to protect sensitive data will further ensure data is not compromised in any incident. Encrypting data also will help the business continue to comply with regulations. Businesses also can use secure backup storage devices, access controls, and monitoring.

Testing is imperative for the backup and recovering plan. Regular testing will help the IT team ensure that the backups successfully restore the data and environment to a known good state. And it is critical to identify the personnel who is or are responsible for the backup and recovery process prior to an event so restoring the business is as seamless as possible.

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Build a Backup and Recovery Strategy Now

Organizations need to be confident that their data is readily available across their entire environment, whether on-premises, in the cloud, in multiple clouds, or in hybrid environments. They need help to maintain data availability and avoid costly data loss scenarios.

Wherever data resides, businesses must keep it safe, compliant, and rapidly recoverable with a backup and recovery plan. Backup and recovery will reduce the chances of data loss scenarios, segregated data silos, missed recovery SLAs, and inefficient scaling. A dedicated cyber backup and recovery plan, backed by specialized tools, personnel, and frequent testing, is essential for mitigating these malicious attacks’ specific risks and complexities.

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