Atlanta – did you know, World Backup Day is March 31st?
Nerdy, we know – but according to a leading backup company, only 15% of organizations back up data multiple times a day. Depending on your organization’s data security requirements, this could be a problem. How much is losing 4 hours of company-wide productivity worth to your business? 4 days? 4 weeks? What is more, most businesses don’t have a documented disaster recovery process in place, which can lead to catastrophic results in the event of a system crash or failure.
Why back up?
For companies that rely on their digital work product – such as attorneys, marketing professionals, and other service providers – keeping your organization’s data safeguarded is essential. If you have a storage issue, backing up information can be the difference between staying in business and closing for many, such as those in regulated industries, or where information is essential to business operations.
Cyberthreats are another big reason to keep your data backed up – with malware and ransomware threats on the rise in 2021 and beyond. If your organization is hit with an attack, it can relieve some of the burden if an additional copy is available of your stolen information.
Backup 101 – What is “good” backup practice?
It is important to discuss the pros and cons of different backup frequencies and retention policies – including the total cost, how often you will need access to the backup of your data (restores), and how frequent your backups should be. For some data-reliant companies, backing up multiple times a day makes sense, as you are harboring highly sensitive information that would cause major problems for your business and clients if you lost access. Other organizations with less sensitive information may only need to backup once a day or week, especially if they do not have compliance regulations they need to follow like those in legal, healthcare, and financial markets.
Euclid’s recommendation? Follow the 3-2-1 rule.
For our IT and Tech Support partners, we always recommend following the 3-2-1 rule for essential data protection, a best practices or guideline for safeguarding data.
- 3 copies of data maintained (one copy “in production” – or active use, one local backup, and one “cold” backup stored elsewhere, ie the cloud)
- 2 store data on 2 types of media (if you have an issue with one kind of media, you have another kind available to access your data)
- 1 offsite copy (of your data, so that if a fire or on-site issue occurs a backup is available).
The idea of the 3-2-1 rule of data protection is to eliminate single points of failure – it is not a failproof policy or complete guarantee – but helps mitigate a large swath of potential data pitfalls.
How Euclid can help!
Contact us today for a cost-effective review of your current backup practices, and for our expertise with cloud and offsite backup. The “1” of the 3-2-1 rule can be difficult to implement, especially for small and medium sized businesses, but we’re here to help. And for larger organizations, our solutions cover both workstations and servers – including more complex SQL database and state-aware backups!
