Who and how is this being monitored?  A good solution will be automated but nothing should be taken for granted.  Are there logs or some kind of ticket alerting or emailing system to raise the alarm when something goes wrong? 

Something goes wrong…? Like what?

Storage can run low or run out.  Credentials can change or certificates can expire and cause services or backup agents to lose their connections.  File systems or applications can become corrupt and prevent some data from being backed up.  A backup job can be altered by mistake or maliciously causing some or all backups to stop or be incomplete.  Cloud connections can break, or performance issues may cause backups to take so long as to never completely finish.  The list goes on and on.

You need a sophisticated logging and alerting system that is monitored by more than one person.  And you need to regularly verify your backups can be recovered with some kind of “test restore” that demonstrates the integrity of backups.

All too often we see new customers that missed these steps, and they find out too late that backups weren’t done as they expected, and when they needed them. 

Talk to your IT department or professional provider about how your backups are monitored and what the frequency and process is for validation.  And feel free to contact CCI if you would like an independent verification done!

The post Is anyone paying attention to backups? appeared first on CCI Managed Services | IT Services & Support.

Some data is of very high value, and some is far less so. A healthy percentage of what most businesses backup isn’t really data at all!  How’s that you might ask?  Servers run an operating system that gets patched and many also run applications of some kind.  These things can technically be reconstructed via a reloading and reconfiguration process. Older archive data may be substantial in size and very low in value.  So, the temptation to backup only the most important stuff can be driven by cost. The more backup storage you need, the higher the cost of the solution!

Before you decide to pick and choose, think about various scenarios in which restoring an entire system may be required. How long would it take to reload and patch the operating system? How long to reload and patch the applications? What problems might occur in that process?  Just finding software activation keys can turn into a scavenger hunt that increases downtime in such an event. 

Strategic Data Backup Plan

Most businesses will ultimately want to back up everything to avoid excessive downtime in a recovery situation. Putting the whole system back to an earlier healthy state is usually the fastest thing to do and downtime can be very costly.

But many also look to offload flat files and/or archives to inexpensive cloud storage to avoid excessive BDR costs. Services like One Drive, SharePoint and Wasabi offer reliable storage that is well suited to this purpose. You may gain more flexibility in who and how this information is accessed as well!

Don’t forget that although cloud storage is generally very reliable, it can still be lost and should also be backed up. Stay tuned for another blog about how to back up your cloud data!

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