In honor of World Backup Day on March 31st, we encourage your organization to review and strengthen your data backup strategies. Ensuring that your data is securely backed up and reliably recoverable is crucial to your organization’s continuity and resilience.
Here are some key steps to validate your backups and safeguard your enterprise data:
1. Choose a reliable enterprise-grade backup solution. Opt for a reputable and scalable backup solution tailored for businesses, such as Alvaka’s DRworx, Veeam, etc. These solutions offer advanced features to support the specific needs of your enterprise. Make sure you select a solution with immutable backup features, which is a backup file that can’t be altered in any way.
2. Identify critical data. Assess your organization’s data and identify the most crucial information that needs to be backed up. This may include financial records, customer data, project files, and essential system configurations.
3. Make sure your backup job is set to back up all the right stuff. Too many times we have seen backups done every day, but a crucial server was left off of the list. Audit all your infrastructure to make sure it is included in the backup job.
4. Implement a backup strategy appropriate for your organization. Maintain at least three copies of your data, store it on two different media types—preferably two different backup software programs— and keep copies off-site and air-gapped. This approach minimizes the risk of data loss due to various threats, including hardware failures, natural disasters, and cyberattacks.
5. Regularly test and verify data restoration. Perform periodic restoration tests to ensure that you can successfully recover your data. Verify the accuracy and completeness of the restored data to validate the integrity of your backups.
6. Air-gapping and off-site backups. Implement air-gapping techniques to physically isolate your backups from your network, protecting them from ransomware and other cyber threats. Additionally, store backup copies in secure off-site locations to safeguard against local disasters.
7. Monitor, evaluate and manage backup frequency. Configure your backup solution to perform regular backups, daily at minimum. Regularly review and adjust the backup frequency based on your organization’s requirements and risk tolerance. Look up RTO and RPO for more information to learn more about timing issues.
8. Encrypt and protect your backups. Use strong encryption methods to secure your data backups, both in transit and at rest. Implement access controls and authentication measures to prevent unauthorized access to your backup data.
9. Update backup software and systems. Keep your backup software, systems, and infrastructure up-to-date with the latest patches, updates, and security measures to ensure optimal performance and compatibility.
10. Review backup logs and reports. Regularly monitor backup logs and reports to identify any errors or issues. Address any problems promptly to ensure that your backup processes are running smoothly and effectively.
11. Develop a comprehensive backup and recovery plan. Document your organization’s backup strategy, including the types of data to be backed up, the backup methods, frequency, locations, and recovery procedures. Regularly review and update the plan to accommodate your evolving business needs. Look up RTO and RPO for more information to learn more about timing issues.
12. Educate and train your staff. Provide training and resources to your employees on the importance of data protection, backup best practices, and the specific procedures they should follow within your organization.
By following these steps, you can be confident that your enterprise’s backups are secure and effective. World Backup Day is an excellent reminder to prioritize data protection and ensure that your organization is prepared for any unexpected data loss events.
Click HERE to learn more about DRworx, Alvaka’s backup solution.
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Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.