An IT Support Blog from London

Disaster recovery is one of those topics that isn't particularly complicated, yet is easily misunderstood. It is, nonetheless, a crucial aspect of technology management. The cost of a disaster can be tremendous, and with no fast route to recovery, an adverse event can have game-changing consequences for a business.

Getting backup and disaster recovery right is not that hard, yet 50% of UK businesses are leaving their data at risk, according to a 2018 survey. Though businesses generally make some effort to guard against disaster, plenty of disaster recovery myths persist. In this article, we tackle those myths and propose steps to ensure a reliable disaster recovery scenario.

The concerns businesses have about handing data over to cloud providers have, to a large extent, been assuaged. The ongoing growth of Microsoft’s Office 365 and the general trend towards cloud computing are evidence of this. Yet, as much as cloud providers are now seen as secure, businesses still need to take steps to prevent the loss of data stored in the cloud.

In an interesting finding, Gartner suggests that through 2022, 95% of cloud security failures will be the fault of customers, not cloud service providers. As much as Office 365 is easy to adopt administrators carry a strong responsibility to maintain security. Here are three steps that can help your business secure its Office 365 data.

Disasters are by definition rare and unpredictable and therefore not front and centre when executives think about day to day operational activities. Yet an information technology disaster can strike any business, and the costs to recover from such an event can be tremendous. As with many risks, the probability of a disaster affecting your company’s information technology infrastructure can be mitigated, and so can the fallout should the worst happen. One of the best ways to reduce the damage is to have a well-designed and tested disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place.

Data backups are among the top cyber security countermeasures against ransomware, flood, fire, and other threats to data availability. As long as you have backup copies of your data, your business will have a pretty good chance of recovering from almost any major disaster. But what kind of data backup solution is the best?

It depends on your specific requirements. These days, backup solutions can be grouped into two - online backups and offline backups. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Knowing when to select one over the other can help you maximise your financial resources when spending on a backup solution.

Since a comprehensive comparison of these two sets of solutions can be quite long, we’ve decided to focus first on online backups. In this post, we’ll help identify situations when an online backup would be a better fit. But before we do that, let me make sure our definitions of these terms are the same.

Companies who require high levels of availability need a reliable disaster recovery strategy. For many organisations, that usually means adhering to the 3-2-1 backup rule, where the 1 refers to keeping 1 backup copy offsite. Traditionally, that copy is stored in a dedicated, company-owned and/or managed disaster recovery infrastructure. Lately, however, businesses have started turning to cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. This article explains why that strategy is better.

What is the 3-2-1 backup rule?

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a highly recommended backup strategy that says you must:

• Possess at least 3 copies of your data;
• Store copies on two different kinds of storage media; and
• Keep one of those copies offsite.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are almost inseparable these days. Some people even use them interchangeably. But did you know that, while they’re closely related, they’re actually not one and the same?

Knowing the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is important. You’ll need it when you set out to address risks to your business’ availability and uptime. Will you be needing a business continuity plan? Or just a disaster recovery plan? Before seeking support from management or the board of trustees for your BC/DR project, you need to know exactly what you’re talking about.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

For many years, the IT industry has used the threat of going out of business as a way of compelling businesses to invest in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions. Essentially, there has been more than a little scaremongering about the risk of failing to back up data properly and putting appropriate plans in place for disaster recovery.

Backup and DR in 20 mins

Not so very long ago most businesses relied on tape-based backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) processes. For many, this was highly unsatisfactory, and their overall perceptions of tape backups were shaped by problems such as:

• Often unreliable with errors because of open files, tape media faults and drive failures
• Only run as fast as the slowest link in the chain, frequently the tape read/write speed
• Getting the tape from the office manager’s flat back to the office quickly
• Are very slow when it comes to restoring significant volumes of data

Today’s backup technologies have revolutionised speed and reliability and transformed disaster recovery, and now businesses can be returned to full operational capability in as little as 20 minutes when using good backup and DR solutions.