Where do you store your backup?
Which providers do you depend on to access your backups? Find out more about what's important when it comes to storing backups of business-critical data.
The backup - your last lifeline
Backups and their restoration are an important part of your business continuity plan. Your business depends on your IT systems and the information (data) contained within them, and if an undesirable event were to destroy this information, you need to be able to restore it using your backups.
Technological developments have also affected how we manage our backups, i.e. we have moved from making backups on physical tapes to making backups on hard drives and cloud-based backup services.
This development has been exploited by, among others, ransomware actors, who destroy backups at the same time as they destroy the original data. This has put businesses in a major crisis as critical information cannot be recovered.
The transition to increased use of cloud services has also led to backups being moved to the cloud services' built-in backup systems. These are technically capable and well integrated into a whole. However, this development has led to a change: You can no longer physically take your backup tapes with you and read them into a new IT environment. Instead, you have to rely on the providers of these backup services to ensure that the backups are available when they are needed.
It is important to include this aspect in your risk assessment if you want to hand over control of all critical information, including all backups, to an external party.
What can be done to increase the protection of backups?
There are a number of things that can be done to increase protection, and it starts with understanding how valuable the information is. A business often has a large amount of information where the protection value is different for different parts of the information set. In other words, some information is more critical than others. This division is made partly for financial reasons, but also to ensure that the most critical information is recovered first.
When using cloud services, for example, extended protection may mean that backups are also taken to a backup service outside the cloud service in question. Here it is important to identify whether the provider of such a service has any dependencies on the cloud service you use.
Using an external service for backup can mean that restoration takes longer, so it's worth considering whether the external service should be a supplement or the primary backup.
Wherever you choose to store your backups, it's important to make sure you test that recovery is possible.
Read the article: How does your business cope with a data crash >
