This Sunday is World Backup Day. However every day should be a World Backup Day. Today’s businesses rely on their data to differentiate themselves from their competition and drive their success, from proprietary business plans to confidential customer data to classified employee information. Simply put, organizations of all sizes must protect their information from anything life might throw at them, including theft, Internet attacks, hard drive crashes, natural disasters, to even employees losing laptops – there are literally thousands of examples of potential information mishaps. And if you can’t replace the missing information, you put your business at risk, including the possibility of having to shutter your doors.
What to Look for in a Backup Solution
Backup can be simple, but to ensure it’s effective in today’s increasingly complex IT environment, businesses should consider the following:
- Take advantage of common software platforms to streamline processes. They allow you to manage backup functions through a centralized dashboard, unifying physical and virtual resources as you perform backup and recovery tasks
- Be sure to implement deduplication for all backup data to truly maximize storage savings. This should be done at all levels. And while you’re at it, look to pair your backup with archiving as well, which will help reduce costs and leave more frequently accessed files to be retained in your backup
- Control data growth. Backup is facilitated when there is less data to manage, and learning where your data resides and what it contains can lead to substantial time and cost savings. Further, creating policies around what information is most important and where it is stored helps make the backup process itself simpler, faster and less resource-intensive.
- When selecting a vendor to help with backup, look for one that keeps management simple by supporting both physical and virtual environments. Backup should be intuitive and easy to manage. Multiple solutions are less likely to be used to their full potential.
- And use it! The solution you deploy should be simple to install and use, but it’s also important to conduct regular tests in order to make sure recovery works. Regular testing can help you identify flaws in your policies and storage, allowing you to make corrections before a data loss incident occurs.
Don’t allow yourself to become a headline or a statistic. Take the proper steps now to protect your information by implementing backup technologies that will help ensure your operations keep running smoothly in the event of an unforeseen disaster. And make every day a World Backup Day.