Ultimate Guide to Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)

Every business should prepare for potential disruptions. Backup and disaster recovery (BDR) will help you in dealing with disruptions. These two practices will help you in ensuring business continuity. You can’t recover your data from power outages and data breaches if you are not following these practices. These practices will help you in avoiding reputation hits, loss of revenue, and data loss. In this article, we are going to talk about Backup and disaster recovery. These two related practices will help you in overcoming the crisis.

What is Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)?

A backup is simply a copy of your data or files. You can use it for restoring your data in case anything happens to original files. Creating a data backup will help you in protecting your business from disasters that can affect data safety and integrity. This will include events like faulty patching, accidental deletion, software bug, crashed hard drive, and database corruption.

Disaster recovery will help you to quickly gain access back to your IT resources and apps after a disaster. Companies create this plan for dealing with natural and man-made disasters. Natural disasters like floods, wildfires, tornadoes, and earthquakes can disrupt power grids and cause physical damage to your data center. Man-made disasters like cyber attacks, malware, and theft can also lead to data loss.

A disaster recovery plan will help you in recovering your data after a disaster. Both of these practices are different. However, there are various things that overlap between these two practices. Every Disaster recovery plan will need some form of backup. However, backups alone won’t help you in maintaining business continuity. The only way to maintain business continuity is by creating a robust disaster recovery strategy. This strategy will ensure that your business can operate even during a disaster.

Importance of Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)

1. The cost of downtime is high

Downtime happens when your data and apps become unavailable. Your end-users can’t access your data and applications. Downtime will have a huge impact on your business.

Your employees can’t do their jobs as they can’t access their data. The transactions will be frozen. Your customers will move towards your competitors for doing their work. You will lose a lot of business revenue.

Small businesses can lose from $80,000 to $250,000 in every downtime event. The average cost of IT downtime is around $300,000 per hour in the USA. This price is going up by 36% every year.

Your disaster recovery plan will help you in preventing downtime. It will ensure that you can easily switch operations to backup IT resources. This will ensure that your business is up during a disaster.

2. Avoiding data loss

If your file gets deleted, then you need a backup for restoring it. You can’t recover your deleted files until you have a backup. Your data will be gone forever if you don’t have a backup.

You can lose data due to cyber attacks, data corruption, hardware failure, malicious deletion, and physical damage to your storage units. Data backup will help you in restoring your deleted files. This won’t help you in protecting your data from data theft. However, data backups will ensure that you won’t lose your files.

3. Protect your business reputation

If your customers think that you can lose their data, then they won’t work with you. You will lose your current customers and also your future customers. They will tell others to avoid your company as you lost their data. Unhappy customers will leave negative reviews about your online business. This will give you a poor online rating. It will become very difficult to acquire new customers. You will lose revenue if you don’t have a proper BDR plan. A good BDR plan will help you in protecting your business reputation.

4. Cyber threats

Every business should take a proactive cyber security approach. You should use Intrusion detection systems and robust firewalls for protecting your network. However, you can never truly protect your business from every cyber threat. It is important to prepare a responsive plan in advance. This will help you in limiting the damage of a successful cyber attack.

A proper DR plan will help you to quickly identify threats. You can respond quickly to these threats. It will also help you in removing the attacker from your IT infrastructure.

Backups will help you in mitigating data loss. It will ensure that you can easily recover from an attack without losing your data. Thus, you need both backups and a disaster recovery plan for protecting your business.

5. Compliance

Companies need to comply with various government regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS. You might need to have an always active IT infrastructure for complying with these regulations. Regular data backups are part of every government regulation. In these cases, a lack of backup and DR Plan can lead to penalties and fines.

Businesses don’t get an exception from regulations like PCI and HIPAA. It is important to maintain compliance even if things are getting messy for you. Good disaster recovery and backup plan will help you in easing the compliance burden.

Data backups will ensure that you won’t lose your sensitive data due to data leakage. This is a requirement for almost every data regulation. However, you still need to protect your data from theft. This can be done by using at-rest encryption. Make sure that all your data is encrypted.

Your disaster recovery plan will help you in responding to disasters. It will ensure that your IT systems will stay available during disasters. Your DR plan will ensure that your IT systems are up to date.

6. Protect your remote workers

There are various benefits of enabling BYOD and remote work. However, these strategies come with their own risks:

• Your IT team will have less visibility of your employee devices.
• Personal devices will have weak security compared to corporate devices.
• A home Wi-Fi network is less secure as users generally use weak passwords.
• Your employees will also use their personal devices for their personal work. This will increase the attack surface.
• Someone can steal your employee device. This can lead to data theft and data loss.

These two things can lead to permanent data loss if you don’t have proper backups. Data backups will ensure that you can recover your data even if your employees lose it. A disaster recovery plan will ensure that your IT security team can disable a lost device. They can remotely wipe the data from your employee device. This will ensure that the thief can’t steal your data.

7. Reduce the human error factor

Everyone can make mistakes. Your workforce can also make some mistakes. They might forget to save their changes or feed incorrect data into your database. Your employees can accidentally delete files or might press the wrong button.

A robust backup system will ensure that you won’t lose data due to human errors. Your Disaster Recovery or DR plan will help you in lowering the chance of costly human errors. It will help you in finding threats quickly. Your DR plan will help you in responding to threats.

8. Damage control

Disasters can cause damage to your business. They will hurt your business revenue and reputation. A backup and disaster recovery plan will help you in damage control.

Your angry ex-employees might delete some data or files. A robust backup plan will ensure that you can quickly recover the data that is deleted by your employees. You should also have a backup failover site. This will ensure that you can keep your servers up even during a power outage.

Sometimes you can lose your IT infrastructure due to natural disasters. A cloud backup will help you in recovering your data in such cases. A disaster recovery plan will help you in moving all the equipment into a windowless room during a hurricane. This will help you in saving your IT equipment.

Attackers can get access to your network. A disaster recovery plan will ensure that you can quickly respond to limit the lateral movement of attackers. It will help you in controlling the attack radius. If your business is suffering from a ransomware attack, then a robust Disaster recovery plan will help you in protecting your business. It will help you in stopping attackers from spreading malware to new devices. A good backup plan will ensure that you can restore your data.

Key Components of Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)

If you want your BDR plan to be successful, then your plan should contain several key components. Make sure that you have all these components in place.

1. Written plan

Your BDR plan should begin with a written plan first. Some organizations create BDR practices when they need them. This will lead to problems in the future. If you are adding new things to your plan when you need them, then your plan will be complicated. An ineffective plan won’t help your organization.

If you want to avoid these problems, then you should start by creating a BDR plan. This plan should contain all the BDR systems and practices. You should first understand the disasters that can affect your business. This will help you in preparing your business for these disasters. Your BDR plan should stay clean. Make sure that you are only including the necessary things in this plan. Mention the key players in your plan and find the most important systems. Make sure that you have the contact information of everyone involved.

2. Data backup systems

You must have a robust data backup plan. This is going to be the most important part of your BDR plan. It can be difficult to initially set up a backup plan. However, they will help you in achieving redundancy. If your system fails, then you can easily recover your lost data by using these data backups.

You need data backups for ensuring that everything is running smoothly. It is important to set up a data backup system for your organization. This will help you in backing up all the files before disaster strikes your organization.

Make sure that your data backups are secure. You don’t want your backups to be infected as you will lose access to all your data. It is important to regularly test your backups. This will ensure that your backups will work when you need them. You should have multiple kinds of backups like cloud and local backups. Choose the best recovery model for your business.

3. Accountability measures

You also need to assign and track the accountability of your users. Someone must be responsible for your recovery process. Key personnel like technical support teams and IT directors should be assigned to recovery tasks. They should also have a written document that they can follow during a disaster. This will ensure that your employees will be accountable.

Conclusion

Every business should have a plan for dealing with disasters, accidental file deletion, data breaches, and server failures. A backup and disaster recovery plan will ensure that you can deal with these events. These events won’t have a long-term impact on your business. Thus, it is important to put these strategies in place. They will help you in protecting your business from disasters. In case of a disaster, you can quickly restore your files and systems. This will help you in ensuring business continuity.

It can be difficult to set up all these systems for SMBs. Thus, you should consider working with a good MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in regularly backing up your data. They will help you in setting up local and cloud backups. Bleuwire will also help you in creating a disaster recovery plan for your business. They will help you in implementing your disaster recovery plan. This will ensure that your business is ready for every crisis. They will help you quickly recover your data and systems in case of a disaster. If you need more information regarding a Backup and disaster recovery plan, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.