How effective is your data back-up plan?

How effective is your data back-up plan?

With cyber breaches on the rise, the cost of ransomware attacks has continued to increase during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not just in terms of monetary losses when businesses have paid attackers to regain their data, but also in terms of reputational damage and the pressure on the organisation to restore business continuity as quickly as possible.

This is when you need an effective data back-up plan – one that not only enables you to keep the business running in the event of an attack, but that also ensures the backed up data is completely separate from your core systems so it can’t be compromised.

Plan around your data

There are a number of issues that will affect the speed of any data back-up plan. For example, the type of media you use to store your data – discs, tapes etc. – will influence the speed of recovery. The nature of the data itself will also be a factor. For example, a thousand items that are all 1MB will take a different amount of time to recover than 100 items that are 10MB. The speed of recovery will vary, depending on the size of the file, the type of file and the location.

Back up and running quickly

If your network experiences a data breach, your first priority will be to get the core business up and running again as soon as possible.

Restoring the operating system is a drastic, but fairly straightforward task. But when it comes to your data, you need to organise it into small blocks of data that can be prioritised. Why? Because if all your data is stored together in single folder structure, it can take a very long time restore. This could become business impacting, depending on the size of your organisation and the extent of the damage caused by the attack, you may not always be able to afford to retrieve everything immediately.

By segmenting your data – for example into business critical data, work in progress, and archived work – you can prioritise which pieces of data are restored first and keep your business running at the same time. Then the data that’s less of a priority can be restored at a different rate in the background.

Effective data management

This segmentation approach relies on sound data management to make it work effectively. Your plan needs to include regular data checks to ensure that the data on your company is organised correctly. Without this structure, the data recovery process will be less effective , because the business critical work-in-progress data  could take a very long time to restore  and won’t be accessible quickly  when you need it.

Do you have any data back-up and recovery concerns?

To discuss how we can help to protect your data, please contact Andrew Wayman at andrew.wayman@sdt.co.uk or call our office on +44 (0)1344 870062.