Top Five Disaster Recovery Mistakes

Data Recovery is a big business, and data loss happens every day. These are the top five disaster recovery mistakes businesses make. Disasters can strike at any time. Sure, you can always purchase a new computer, server, hardware, but the key to ensuring survival for your business is robust data protection and a disaster recovery plan. Data is crucial, and essential to keep employees working and clients’ information secure and available. With data, your business could be at serious risk.

Understanding and protecting data is essential to business continuity.

Setting up a disaster recovery plan involves policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of business following a natural, technical, or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on IT systems that support critical business functions.

For businesses, the main question is – “Is our data being backed up the right data?” Data loss is hard to image until it is gone, or data is crucial for a business to run on a daily basis until the moment a disaster occurs.

 

Here are the top five disaster recovery mistakes that are made:

Almost all failures to plan to revolve around not have a solid backup plan including.

1. Failure to plan and insufficient backups

• Not backing up all data or not backing up the right data –  Businesses need to be prepared for a disaster. I often revived data recovery cases from home users who have no backups. Business I often get they have made backups occasionally, but all lacking a solid plan or backing up all their data. Many small businesses do not have a dedicated I.T professional for backup and disaster support. This often leads to not having all data or not having the right data. Employees even in cases where a basic backup is set up but not schedule often forget to backup or procrastinate. I offer software solutions to help schedule your backups.
• Having too few copies of your data – For a data loss or disaster often more than one copy is required, especially in the case of natural disaster hardware failure or damage to a room or building.  This is why it is imperative to follow the 3–2–1 backup strategy. If your business experiences a  data loss or network failure, this should allow for lost data from another storage location or medium. Following the 3–2–1 rule means you should always keep three copies of your files, two local and on different devices, and one remote.
• Not testing backups – Backups are useless if they do not work – period. Often business owners discover that their backup schedule was too infrequent, backups were not working at all, or important files databases or folders, or even entire computers or servers were not backed up or stored in a secure location. Backups of backups can even be crucial in ransomware situations.

2. Forgetting that people are part of the equation

Data loss a large percentage of the time is caused by human error. Accidental or negligent data deletion, file modification, or over-writing files, drive formatting, partitioning, or changes to a database cause a huge amount of data loss. In addition, in some cases data loss is caused by a human error then a technical issue, like if an employee allows a ransomware infection in a network.

3. Poor Reporting Practices

This takes two forms. First poor reporting of actual backup procedures and audits. Second when a data loss or disaster occurs, on some occasions people are hesitant to report for fear of repercussions. Any data loss or technical problem should be reported. Every report helps build a better outcome if data recovery is needed.

4. Having an implementation plan

The steps to creating a disaster recovery plan are working with a professional that can evaluate your business needs. Once that is complete they can help you create policies, tools technical solutions, and procedures for implementing a backup process for the organization and all the ways a disaster could go wrong.

5. Thinking you’re done

Even if you have implemented a disaster recovery plan, with a backup solution, and are following the 3-2-1 backup plan with everyone being on board and knowing the policies you are not done.

In conclusion, businesses change, backups can break, data loss can occur, regulations and technology change, and employees come and go. Your data backups and company disaster recovery plan need upkeep and making sure your data safe is a long-term commitment.