Businesses tolerate less and less downtime every year, so reliable backup and recovery processes that help companies recover quickly from outages are vital. Backup tools put in place years ago may not be able to meet today’s intense demands for multiple reasons:

• they require a lot of manual work
• they have limited features
• they are too slow to backup or restore
• they can’t protect SaaS resources

If your existing backup solution is running into these or other problems, it’s time to review your backup process and implement a modern, easy to manage, effective backup solution.

Choosing a Backup Solution

When selecting a backup solution, as always, begin by understanding your current IT environment and your requirements. The chosen backup solution must be able to support your data volume, address your data security concerns, and handle any legacy systems. Implementing it shouldn’t be excessively costly or time-consuming, and you should be able to easily train your operations staff to monitor and support the new process. Many businesses want a single backup solution that can handle both on premises and cloud resources, though they may also need a solution specifically designed to protect SaaS systems such as Microsoft 365.

In addition to those requirements, which mostly address the technical concerns, the backup process must be able to meet business concerns. This means finding backup solutions that can restore data quickly, to minimize recovery time. Importantly, rapid recovery isn’t simply about replacing the data quickly; first you need to be able to find the data to be restored. With the large volumes of data being backed up, the ability to browse and search backups is important. Businesses also want to lose minimal data in case of an outage, so backup solutions need the ability to capture changes as they happen.

Managing the Backup Solution

Even the best backup solution needs effective management; without it, systems are omitted from backups and failed backups aren’t corrected. The management process requires:

• reviewing backup error logs and addressing alerts
• ensuring backup media is working properly (if not backing up to cloud)
• ensuring adequate storage capacity for backups (if not backing up to cloud)
• making sure backup copies are accessible in case of an outage
• verifying backup copies are secure
• testing restore process periodically to ensure it works and meets recovery objectives
• ensuring backup processes are updated as part of application change control
• reviewing backup schedule for impacts on business, as requirements change

The entire backup procedure should be reviewed periodically to make sure it is aligned with business needs.

Prescient Solutions helps businesses design and implement backups solutions that are part of a comprehensive, effective disaster recovery process. Contact Prescient Solutions to update your backup process and make sure your business data is protected against loss.