While organisations understand the necessity for backups, very few have role-played a scenario whereby their critical business data was lost and, therefore, do not fully understand the importance of backups.
So says Dino Carletti, sales manager at ITNA, who points out that data backups form part of a greater business continuity plan which, in many organisations, is simply non-existent.
According to Carletti, organisations whose digital data is critical to their daily business function understand the value of their data and, therefore, assign a reasonable budget towards securing that data in the event of a loss.
"Having said that, almost every week, we engage with organisations who are simply struggling with their self-managed backups and who haven't had a successful backup in weeks. Our approach in such instances has always been to understand the client's business requirements, offer advice and guidance and then propose a solution that meets their requirements."
He is of the view that the focus of IT departments should be to enable the flow of information that facilitates the growth of the organisation.
"Having skilled resources, which are difficult to come by, spend their valuable time monitoring and supporting the organisation's daily backups is not an efficient use of their time," says Carletti. "Backups and data restoration is a critical function that requires formal processes and procedures, as well as outputs that are governed by defined SLAs, which are typically offered by specialist service providers," he adds.
Outsourcing backup solutions has the advantage of redeployment of skilled resources to more business-beneficial tasks and projects, says Carletti, adding that organisations will have peace of mind that daily backups are taking place, being monitored and reported on, and bound by a service level agreement.
The other advantage is that the service is backed by a team of resources trained specifically to perform backups and data restorations.
"Data is automatically encrypted and kept offsite in multiple secure locations. The function becomes an operational expenditure and the need to continually procure new hardware, backups software and training on a regular basis falls away."
ITNA's nine backup best practice facts:
1. A good managed backup service makes provision for multiple copies of the data in separate secure locations.
2. The investment in skills and infrastructure required for companies to do this themselves does not make business sense when the industry experts can deliver a better service far more cost-effectively.
3. Managed backup solutions come in many forms and are tailored to meet the clients' requirements in terms of time to restore and size of data.
4. Key questions to resolve are: is this data distributed across many servers and geographical locations, and is there a requirement to backup end-user devices such as laptops and mobiles?
5. In deciding what data should be kept, determine what information you cannot afford to lose. Once you know what requires backing up, determine the type of data, where it is located and how long you need to retain the data for.
6. It is important to determine how much time is needed to recover the data in the event of a loss and once this is determined, perform a test restore to ensure that the business objectives can be achieved.
7. Backing up many copies of the same data is time consuming and wasteful expenditure of bandwidth and storage. A good managed backup service will make use of tools that have the ability to perform deduplication on the data, such that the data is only copied once, despite being found in various locations within the environment.
8. Automated daily backup and reporting is a key requirement. Backup failures do occur and for many reasons, but a good managed backup service provider will proactively address these failures and ensure that a current backup is performed either immediately or at the next scheduled time.
9. Document the data selection list, processes and procedures to ensure that backups are completed properly. Assign appropriately trained personnel to carry out this critical task.
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