Backup Systems and Strategies for Business Continuity


Any business with a view towards self-preservation employs a backup scheme as part of its overall disaster recovery plan. Goes without saying, right? But it's truly astonishing how many businesses operate without a recovery plan that incorporates a tried and tested backup and restoration regime. Here's fundamental truth - you don't know if your disaster recovery plan is effective unless and until you test it. This is one area where you can't afford uncertainty, and you surely can't afford to be wrong.

 

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

    Viruses, Trojans and Worms (Id theft, etc)

     Fire / Flood / Natural Disasters

     Theft (physical and logical)

      Hacker attack (simple vandalism, other damage)

      Employee malfeasance / incompetence

      Hardware failures (hard drives, servers, network)

      Software problems (upgrades gone bad, etc)

      Loss / lack of control (you can’t protect assets that you don’t know about.)

 

That's the short list. There's more. You may already have experienced problems associated with lost data, bad backups, virus outbreaks and other issues. But it’s the less obvious stuff that can literally take your business systems down – and your business along with it - before you even know what's happened..  

Reliable Backup and Restoration - Two Immutable Truths

1. If you don't implement a backup system and strategy, you are doomed.

2. Once damage has been done to files on your systems, it is usually too late.

All right - Three Immutable Truths

3. The backup you made [a month ago, a week ago, last night] will be corrupt or otherwise useless.

Now, a few trick questions:

  • When’s the last time you backed up everything?
  • When’s the last time you backed up anything?
  • When’s the last time you tested and verified your backups?
Finally, what approach must you take to ensure the continuity – to ensure the survival – of your business?  How do you ensure the confidentiality, availability and integrity of the information upon which your business depends?  It all starts with a well-thought-out (and well-rehearsed) disaster recovery plan of which robust, reliable backups are but a part.

 

Backups - What Are We Really Talking About?

In order to get a handle on what we’re really trying to accomplish, let’s redefine the outcome of a backup and restoration: and once again, that outcome is business continuity. Put another way, given a disaster, how quickly can you resume normal business operations? When it comes to backups, there are several good products that come to mind for this purpose, but it’s worth considering what we really need to accomplish when we talk about effective backup and restoration. It's a common error to regard backup of important files - business docs, spreadsheets, email and accounting data, for example – as sufficient. While this is always a good idea, backup of just your files doesn’t quite do the whole job - not by half. And the worst time to discover this is after you’ve had a catastrophe of some sort.

 

In order to achieve true business continuity, you must backup not just your files, but the entire machine state: that's operating system, programs, preferences, configuration and data. Consider that while your data are invaluable, you cannot even begin to resume normal business operations until you have a machine that is running in more or less the same condition that it was before the catastrophe. Think about all of the time and effort required to set up your workstations in the first place (and then triple or quadruple that for a server). Think about every program, every preference, every password and configuration option, every update and upgrade that amounts to the total state of that machine. Then think about what it would take to duplicate that down to the last detail - that is, if you actually had in your possession all the information, program disks, license keys and other data necessary to get back to where you once were. Now you've got a notion of the real value of that machine, and it goes well beyond the data stored on it.

 

So here's your picture: Hardware's relatively cheap. The stuff that's on it isn't.

 

And the Goal Is...

 

Accordingly, the backup system and strategy (and you need both) that you need is one capable of performing what is termed “bare metal" backup and restoration from the most recent data available. This means that you should be able to go out and replace your original system with a brand new one and restore the entire machine’s previous state along with all of your data within 45 minutes or less. 

 

How Do We Get There?

 

On-Site Backup. We can accomplish reliable local bare metal back up and restoration of all of the workstations and servers on your network by using either an entry-level network-attached storage device (otherwise known as an NAS) or an external hard disk drive and a program called Acronis True Image. Acronis True Image will capture the the entire state of a server or a workstation and it will do so 'on the fly'. This approach is both inexpensive and reliable, and in the case of an NAS device or a storage server, it can be scaled up to any desired level.

 

Off-Site Backup. Another approach serves either as an alternative or better still - a complement to your over all backup strategy. And that's off-site backup. Off-site backup is available as a managed service - that is, a service that one subscribes to. Such a service provides both the technology, storage and management of your backup.  Visit Remote Data Backups for an example and a free trial of this type of service.

 

So - we have the tools, but how should we use them?