Moving to a hybrid type backup system with onsite and cloud retention policies is the best disaster recovery solution available
Data disasters are a fact of life, but like natural disasters, they are events that most businesses think will never come for them. You never see the software update that corrupts all your data coming. You never expect the rains this week to flood your building and drown your servers. It’s easy to think that malware attacks happen to other businesses, but somehow yours won’t get hit. But data disasters happen and businesses rarely see them coming.
Fortunately, you don’t have to see them coming. You just have to have a backup plan. That’s why backup-recovery plans are essential. Taking backups gives you a way to partially or completely restore your data from a save-point, like a video game where you can die and reload. And the best backups today are those stored on the cloud. Cloud backups are not on any one server that can be destroyed are damaged. They are distributed over several servers throughout the world and therefore can be retrieved no matter what happens to your company’s local servers or even cloud servers in a particular location.
Let’s take a look at four completely different types of disasters that cloud backups can protect you from.
Local Software Failures and Data Corruption
Software updates are always the type of data disaster that takes a company by surprise. You’re confident in your tech stack and are working with good software, but updates don’t always work. Especially if you’re updating from several versions behind. Data needs to be altered and updated to align with any changes made in the software, but this can result in corruption. Some companies have experienced complete data loss because their data was corrupted in a software update.
Updating the software on your local or dedicated cloud servers can corrupt all the data on your normal servers. But cloud backups mean you can bring back that data at any time in the original form. You can try the update more carefully or import your old data into a fresh install of the latest version without the disaster of servers-full of corrupted data.
Fires, Floods, and Hurricanes
Natural disasters and human-made disasters can do a number on your office building. If you’ve ever seen a glass tower wrecked by tornadoes or hurricanes or seen streets flowing like rivers with rainwater, you know that office buildings are not impervious from the elements. Your basement full of servers can flood in a storm or the windows might blow out with equipment destroyed within. Your building might catch fire from lightning or faulty wires or a forgotten space heater and the whole interior can go up in flames.
Whether part of your building and equipment is damaged or everything in your workplace, your cloud backups are safe. You can rebuild your data and your entire business infrastructure by loading those backups into new computers in an undamaged location.
Sudden Building Relocation
Speaking of setting up in a new location, that’s another great capability of cloud backups. Whether natural disaster or sudden logistics requirement, cloud backups make it possible to set up a new business location anywhere with any computers. You can build off a new location by cloning your backups into a new set of computers. Or you can quickly relocate, rebuilding your business from scratch if necessary if the truly unexpected or disastrous happens. That’s the great thing about cloud backups, you can load them to and from anywhere.
Network-Invasion Type Malware
Finally, cloud backups keep your data safe in the face of localized malware. There are several types of malware that specialize in invading your business network. Like some ransomware, these malware types invade one computer on your local network, then spread to other devices on the network. Your entire local computer system can be infected in minutes, which is most easily eradicated by wiping everything to factory settings and reinstalling from scratch.
Cloud backups allow you to do this without worry or delay. If your tech-stack is prepared for quick redeployment and all your data is backed up on the cloud, then a network-wide infection can be recovered in hours, not days.
Is your business ready to fully restore your data from a cloud backup? If you’re planning to build or improve on your backup-recovery system, contact us today! Our team is ready to make your data immortal.