Ensuring your business has an effective backup strategy in place is one of the fundamental responsibilities of business IT teams. Backups are needed not only for compliance and recovery purposes but also to preserve historic data for use in analytics projects. Despite the criticality of this function, many businesses use incomplete backup solutions. There aren’t any real hard statistics, but some have claimed that as many as 96% of business workstations don’t get backed up. That’s a lot of data at risk!

Challenges to Effective Backups

Creating truly effective backups isn’t as straightforward as putting a tape in a drive to create copies every night. Copying to a disk or the cloud every night isn’t a solution, either. These approaches:

May not protect all data.

Business data is scattered across many locations: data centers, clouds, desktops, laptops, home computers, mobile devices. It’s difficult to devise a backup strategy that protects all the important data locations. Because of data siloes, the teams responsible for data may not even know where all the data is.

May not execute often enough.

If you only create backups at end of day, restoring files from backup means losing an entire day’s worth of data. For many businesses, that’s more lost data than they can tolerate.

May require too much downtime.

Businesses run as close to 24×7 as possible. Creating application-consistent backups requires applications to be quiescent for the duration of the backup. Slow backup processes mean applications have to be down longer than the business wants.

May take too long to restore.

Simple data backup strategies may have a correspondingly simple restoration strategy: everything included in the backup is replaced. That makes recovering from even a minor outage a major ordeal. Businesses need more flexible recovery strategies that restore the minimal data required and minimize the outage.

Don’t protect from all outages.

Storing backups in the cloud means businesses are unable to access backups when there is a network or cloud outage.

Don’t protect backed up files from tampering.

Backups are vulnerable to unauthorized access. To ensure backed up data is reliable, backups need to be encrypted and under access control. They also need to be protected against ransomware’s efforts to delete this vital recovery tool.

Get help implementing an effective backup solution that’s part of a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy from Prescient Solutions. Our experts assess your critical data needs, then design and implement the tools and procedures needed to protect them. Ongoing monitoring and support ensures processes continue to run effectively and efficiently and scale as your needs change. Contact Prescient Solutions to learn more about improving your backup process.

Watch the webinar to learn about the cost of downtime here.