3 Critical Rules for Recovery in Today's Data Environments

If you're reading this, there's a good chance that you spend plenty of time in your data center. If so, you know that your data center is evolving and changing just as quickly as the business environment around us. That means new challenges are popping up all the time. 

Phishing was present in 36 percent of all breaches, up 11 percent from last year, according to Verizon's 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report. And ransomware attacks more than doubled. But hackers still dominate the threat landscape, representing nearly 40 percent of all breaches. With threats coming at you from every direction, we've put together the three critical rules for recovery in today's data environments. While these rules may not be news to you, they are always worthy of a reminder.

1. Develop and Maintain Your Disaster Recovery Plan

The only way you can be certain you can recover following any disaster is to plan ahead. We’ve put together an IT disaster recovery planning checklist for you in a recent post. That process includes defining your recovery objectives, determining how you will recover based on those objectives, then testing your plan so you know it is failsafe. And keep your recovery plan up to date. If you do suffer a data loss, you need to identify the cause, the extent of the impact, and how well you responded. Use those critical learnings to update your plan so you can respond even more effectively in the future.

2. Make Sure Your Data Is Always Backed Up

If your data is compromised and you don't have it backed up correctly, you're sunk. Avoiding that starts with solid backup practices. Our new take on the traditional 3-2-1 backup rule is a good place to start. In a nutshell, we recommend that you keep at least three copies of your data, with at least two in separate locations. And we highly recommend that a third copy, the "1" in 3-2-1, should be stored in the cloud. Cloud backups can also help make disaster recovery a snap, especially if you choose to bring on a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider.

3. Test Your Backups

Planning is important. Backups are important. But none of those will be of any help if you can't recover your data when disaster strikes. That's why it's just as important to test your backups. Can you recover all of your data? Where are the glitches? What needs to change so you can be sure of recovery? Testing is another area where DRaaS can make a dramatic difference for your business. Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions like StorageCraft Cloud Services not only let you run your network in the cloud in the case of a disaster—just as you'd run it onsite—they also let you orchestrate your site-wide failover processes and then test them with one push of a button.

It Pays to Follow the Rules

When it comes to your data, the stakes are high. What if you lost all your customer records? Or what if a ransomware attack encrypted all your financial documents and contracts? The consequences could be costly. So to protect yourself from an IT disaster, follow these three critical rules for recovery in today's data environments. And if you need any help assessing your current recovery posture and what you can do to improve it, talk to a StorageCraft engineer.