The threat of data loss is a frightening one for today’s always-on businesses, but storing your data in a cloud-based solution offers a range of options for quick recovery. From malware that completely blocks your access to company data to viruses that can corrupt, it can feel like you’re constantly fending off attacks to one of your organization’s largest and most important assets — your data. The costs of cyber attacks continue to rise, with the WannaCry outbreak causing up to $4 billion of damage worldwide according to one estimate. This number includes not just the hard costs of data retrieval, but also the hidden costs of lost productivity, data restoration and more. These best practices for data backup in the cloud will help you reduce or avoid the costly problems surrounding data loss that have plagued businesses for decades.
Importance of Data Backups
What happens when you’re in the middle of editing a Word or Excel document and the power stops? If you don’t have automatic save turned on, there’s bound to be a fair bit of frustration when the power blinks back on. It may take an hour to re-create your work. That’s the impact on an individual who lost short-term access to a single piece of data. What about when you consider an entire organization losing access to their data and work in progress for hours at a time or even days? It could be next to impossible to re-create an entire day’s worth of conversations with customers and the actions that came out of them, making it crucial to have ready backups of your data available for use. A clean and usable backup acts as insurance for your business.
Data Classifications
In order to form a data backup strategy, you may need to classify your data as “hot, warm or cold” based on how critical the information is and how often it needs to be accessed. Hot data should be stored in a way that allows near-immediate retrieval as it is likely to be used on an hourly basis, while warm data and cold data may be needed on a weekly or even monthly basis. Whether you’re hosting your data in the cloud or on-premise, data backup and recovery solutions are a virtual requirement for modern businesses. No one can predict when data failure may occur, making it mission-critical to be able to quickly restore or rebuild both your data structures and the virtual machines on which they are stored.
Configuring Your Backup
A fully-developed cloud solution will also include access to advanced data backup and recovery options. For some small organizations, the backup process may include creating one or more external hard drives to back up a physical machine being used as a server. Cloud-based storage allows you to make business decisions upfront and automate the process of backing up your data going forward. Configuring your backup is the important first step towards achieving data security and quick access to information regardless of your physical location or that of your data. This fine-tuning of your data storage solution is best achieved with the support of a trusted partner.
Keeping your data secure requires planning and consideration, and a full understanding of the benefits and challenges of utilizing cloud-based storage. With correct configuration, you can rest assured that your data is safe and can be rapidly accessed in the event of any type of emergency. Contact Coretelligent today to see how our CoreCloud and CoreBDR solutions can help you protect, store and retrieve your data.