How to Build Security Into Your Backup Strategy

An unpopular opinion regarding business IT infrastructure is that there’s a big difference between “fun” and “functional.” Sure, your infrastructure might run, but how practical is it, and a better question yet, can it survive a major disaster? While data backup is not the most fun topic in the world, this doesn’t change the fact that your business needs to consider what happens in a data destruction scenario and if it can bounce back in a reasonable timeframe.

If your backup plan consists of a single external hard drive plugged into a server, or if you don’t have backup in place at all, you need a better solution. If you want a security-first backup design, consider integrating the 3-2-1 backup strategy directly into your infrastructure design. Here’s how you do it:

Local Redundancy

The 3-2-1 rule demands that you have at least three copies of your data on two different types of media, with one of them being located in the cloud.

So what do you do with the other types of media? We recommend you keep at least one backup in your office for fast recovery as needed. If a file is lost or deleted, you won’t have to wait for a 50GB download from the cloud to bring it back. You can just initiate a quick local backup and resolve the problem.

But what about the other types of backup?

Immutable Cloud Backups

A best practice is to keep at least one backup stored off-site where it’s “immutable,” but what does that even mean?

Simply put, an immutable backup is one that cannot be deleted or changed. This means that ransomware won’t be able to encrypt it or damage it should you ever fall victim to a ransomware attack. If you think about it, an immutable backup is perhaps the most valuable investment you can make into your data backup system, as it’s a cure-all for the biggest concern most businesses have about their backup solutions: uncertainty.

You can know for sure that your data is exactly how it should be, and that’s an empowering thought to have when facing a data loss disaster.

Virtualization Capabilities

Finally, the last tenant of the 3-2-1 rule demands that you have at least one backup stored in the cloud.

That said, you can take it one step further by hosting your infrastructure in a virtual machine. Essentially, if your physical hardware dies, you can spin up a cloud-based backup in a virtual machine hosted in the cloud. This allows your employees to access important data and files while you’re going through the disaster recovery process.

Virtualization is the difference between three days of downtime and being back in business 30 minutes post-disaster, so why not implement it into your infrastructure today?

Furthermore, you want to ensure that your infrastructure design allows for automated, verifiable backups, which should be the death knell for all your company’s data backup and disaster recovery-related worries. If all of this sounds like a lot, we get it; that’s why we offer our managed IT services to small businesses like yours, complete with data backup and disaster recovery.

Every day you wait is another day your business is at risk. Learn more today by calling us at (800) 484-0195.