With the increasing risk of your systems being infected by ransomware there is no better time to look at your disaster recovery solution.

Disaster recovery involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.

A key part of disaster recovery is ensuring that your data is continually backed up, however, this is only half of the story.

If you haven’t tested that backup and attempted recovery of your data there is no guarantee that it will be available when you need it most.

When setting up your data backup you will be required to choose a frequency for the process, it is at this moment you should think about the possible implications of the timing. Consider this, Acme Co has 10 employees and they operate from 9-5 Monday to Friday, if their data is corrupted on Thursday and the latest recoverable backup is from the previous Friday it would take 320 hours to reproduce the work created in that time – this is without completing any new jobs!

 

A complete data backup and recovery solution should consist of multiple solutions, from a range of vendors. The general rule is that your data should be stored in at least three different places: local, off-site and, the cloud. A full solution will include regular testing of your backup to ensure that when required it is recoverable – this means you need to download the backed up data and confirm that the latest work has been included.

Within your disaster recovery planning you should have multiple avenues for recovery.

It is worth putting some time into researching the most suitable solution for your set up.

There are differing types of data recovery ranging from bare metal (brand new blank PC) to files and folders (would need to go onto a PC already configured). It is a good idea to confirm that your recovery solution has the ability to do more than one recovery type.