A solid back-up plan is ean essential part of your organisation's business strategy. That is because after a failure or malfunction, you want to get back up and running as soon as possible without losing business-critical data to ensure the continuity of your organisation. Nevertheless, it is common for backup mistakes to be made, because, for instance, people are not clear about which aspects of a backup plan deserve extra attention.
WHAT IS IMPORTANT WHEN CREATING A GOOD BACKUP?
On this we can be brief. In fact, when backing up, it is very important to be aware of the following three points:
- Test your backup on a regular basis;
- Make sure your backup technology is independent of the production location, i.e. in another data centre at least 50 kilometres away and not in the same network;
- Make regular backups and always bear in mind the permissible time for recovery (Recovery Time Objective - RTO) and the permissible data loss (Recovery Point Objective - RPO) of your backup strategy.
Explanation of the definitions RPO and RTO
RPO stands for the amount of data that is lost. Suppose you have an RPO of four hours, this means that in the worst case only the data of the last four hours will be lost.
RTO means that if you have an RTO of two hours, your application will be unavailable for two hours in the worst case scenario.
WHERE DO THINGS GO WRONG?
Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of the importance of the above points, which is why mistakes are made when configuring backups. For instance, we sometimes hear that a restore takes too long, causing an organisation to be down for a while. But we also regularly hear that a backup does not contain the right data, because not enough backup moments were created or the data is simply too old (in which case the RPO is too high). Very inconvenient of course, but also simple to solve.
Do you want to make sure your backup strategy is solid? Then ask yourself the following four questions:
1. Are you conscious of the basic rules that apply to your Cloud environment?
Basically, the more secure, the better. An important rule you can use for this is the 3-2-1 backup rule. This means creating 3 copies of your data, which you subsequently store on 2 different types of media and in 1 different location. So, make sure your backup is always independent of the production location. This is where Fundaments comes in. Using Cohesity's innovative technology, we store your data in a different location and on a different platform. Here, Cohesity uses the WORM principle: write once, read many. This ensures that information or data cannot be changed once it has been written and stored. So there is no impact on your backup if the production environment is hit by a ransomware attack. Read more here.
2. Is your restore functioning? Are you testing this frequently?
Many organisations create backups, but often forget the most important part: testing the restore of a backup. Therefore, check your backups regularly. Is all data copied completely? And does everything work after a restore? Cohesity has developed a Test/Dev capability for this purpose. This is for testing software with backup data, but at the same time proving that the backup is working properly. Test/Dev does a restore of data in a separate environment, so there is no impact on the production environment.
3. How long does it take to complete a restore?
The speed of a restore is very important. The larger your environment, the longer a restore will take and therefore the more time it will take to get back to the same production performance. Therefore, make sure you are aware of this so that your organisation experiences the least possible delay in services and you ensure business continuity. Recovery time (and therefore RTO) should be as low as possible.
4. Do you need a DR service in addition to backup?
If it appears that, based on your RPO and RTO requirements, backup cannot meet your needs, it is advisable to also look at a Disaster Recovery solution (DR). This kind of solution ensures that your production site can be easily and quickly restarted in an alternative location. The backup strategy can then be transformed into long-term data storage, where the DR service provides a quick fallback option. See the comparison between backup and DR below:
RPO
Back-up: hours to a day
DR: seconds to a few hours
RTO
Back-up: hours to days
DR: minutes
