Assuming your company is one of the many small business that has gotten better about data security and loss prevention, you are probably ahead of the curve. According to the Small Business Administration, most companies do attempt to backup critical data, but less than 40 percent of small companies have any formal plan at all. The time to realize that you need to prepare for a natural hazard or data hack is not after your office has suffered from a fire or a malicious virus has infected your servers. As you prepare your company’s data backup and recovery plan, consider these common mistakes.
Data Backup and Recovery Mistakes To Avoid
Actually, most small- and medium-sized businesses do attempt to backup critical data. At least, they do it once in awhile. However, they tend to store their backups onsite in the same vulnerable locations and connected to the same network as the computers they sourced the data from. Nothing prevents these onsite backups from being vulnerable to the same physical disasters or cyber attacks as the source computers. Offsite storage and automated backups are key to an efficient backup plan.
Also, while small businesses may have improved in the way they backup data, they don’t always have a clear plan in mind for recovery. It’s really only handy to have 500 customer orders stored on a backup drive if the software to manage those orders and another machine to run that software on are both readily available. The best time to discover flaws in your backup and recovery strategy is not after you have suffered from a loss of data.
How to Develop Foolproof Data and Recovery Strategies
The best suggestion is to run some tests of the recovery plan, especially for the most critical data, before disaster strikes. By the time your company’s survival depends upon your recovery method, it is too late to be testing it for the first time. Also, in the best of circumstances, recovery can take time. That’s why it is probably best to prioritize really critical systems that need to be online so you can continue to operate.
If most data is not that critical, it might be left in archives until the worst of the disaster has passed. For example, your company is surely eager to process customer orders as quickly as possible, but you might be able to put of prospecting for new customers until your recovery has been complete.
