Everyone knows breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you skip breakfast your body feels sluggish, your tasks grow into mountains from molehills, and the rest of your day just seems to drag. Breakfast is important because it provides a good foundation for your day. We’ve all had those days where we’ve missed this important meal, and nothing seems to work out according to plan.
This month, we are focusing on the cornerstone of your IT strategy—your technology “breakfast.” When it comes to IT, backup is akin to making sure you have a good foundation for your business. It is the fallback strategy for when things don’t go according to plan, and you need something reliable to set things right.
Much like breakfast, a good backup plan has multiple food groups or elements to it. The eggs and bacon of your backup strategy is referred to as your local (or on-site) image backup. Your image backup is your immediate “go to” if a file has been lost or accidentally deleted or if you find yourself the victim of a security attack that has corrupted or encrypted your data. Typically, these backups will have a special encryption applied to them to ensure they are not compromised in the attack and are reliable when you need to quickly restore one or multiple files to get the day back on track and avert disaster. Without this piece of your backup breakfast, your data may have been lost or you may have been coerced into paying a “ransom” fee to recover your data—at no guarantee!
With a backup strategy in place that accounts for both internal threats and external disaster recovery, you hedge your bets against becoming the victim of circumstance and can take control of your business’ resiliency.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is not enough. In order to have a truly reliable foundation, we need to cover the second element of a well-rounded backup solution. In the event of a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or a flood, your business location may be at risk of physical damage. While computers and servers can be replaced at a cost, logical information cannot. Therefore, without a cloud backup to pair with your eggs and bacon, your breakfast is severely off balance. A cloud backup will allow you to overcome obstacles like hardware failure as well as provide a secure off-site location that will not be impacted by any event in the office.
There is only so much control you have over external factors such as a natural disaster or an employee who clicks on a malicious email and inadvertently bypasses your company’s carefully configured security controls. When these things happen, your data, productivity, and resources are in jeopardy of being wasted or misused. With a backup strategy in place that accounts for both internal threats and external disaster recovery, you hedge your bets against becoming the victim of circumstance and can take control of your business’ resiliency.
While some of these cases may be extreme, the truth of the matter is that they do happen. Without a good foundation or IT backup breakfast, you may find yourself flat footed and unable to respond well to a disaster or data loss situation.
Have questions on your backup solution? IT Radix has your backup! As part of a balanced breakfast, IT Radix is here to partner with you and help you review your current backup strategy.
Learn more about our data backup solutions here!
First published in our April 2019 IT Radix Resource newsletter
