Backup EVERYTHING!
As we are all neck deep in the #covid19 crises, an overwhelming need businesses face is ensuring their critical information available and safe. Employees are scrambling to get remote access and in doing that are inadvertantly creating exposures to risk. In the first part of this multi-part series, I talked about the importance of having a cyber readiness plan. Today, I’m going to talk about the importance of having a backup of everthing!
Determine the critical pieces of your information infrastructure
The first step of cyber readiness planning can be used as the source for your backup strategy. For most businesses, these critical information sources will include finance and accounting, primary business line applications, email and collaboration data, and important files/folders.
Figure out how much time or data you’re ok losing
First, let’s talk about a couple of acronyms. IT love them.
RTO (recovery time objective) – This is the amount of time you will tolerate a system, computer, or network being down. The shorter the time you can tolerate your systems being down, the more important it becomes to have a backup system that can restore stuff FAST.
RPO (recovery point objective) – The amount of data you are ok losing. If you perform backups one time per day and need to restore anything, you will only have a RPO equal to the last backup. Financial institutions may not be able to tolerate even an hour of data loss.
Build a backup solution that meets both RTO and RPO
Understanding what you’re ok with losing goes a long way in building a BCDR/Backup solution that balances cost vs results.
Test it!
With our BCDR solution, we provide up to 2 free cloud disaster recovery tests where we actually spin up and cutover real workloads in the cloud. It is important to at least test restores of files and servers both locally and in the cloud.
Contact us if you want to learn more about building cyber resisilience for your business!
