Automation is the name of the game when it comes to creating a data recovery plan for your business. Having a data recovery plan in place is a lot like having insurance. Nobody wants to pay for it. It’s a necessary evil. You may feel like you are throwing money away. But when an inevitable mishap occurs, and you have lost your data, then boy will you sure be glad that you had it! Before reading further ensure you have a data recovery professional in mind who can assist you with a plan of action.
If you think that having a data recovery plan is expensive, then you should see how expensive and costly it can be to conduct business without one.
Adopting A “Set It And Forget It” Solution
Your data recovery plan should be automatic. You set it up once, with some upfront effort and some upfront cost, but then it should be able to run on its own, without any further manual intervention.
Whether it operates on a scheduled basis (a backup that runs once every twenty-four hours,for example) or it happens in real-time (an auto-save mechanism, for example), making a backup of your should be something that you shouldn’t have to manually remember to perform. It should just be there for you when you need it.
Cloud-Based Data Recovery Plans
These days, it’s all about the cloud. It is not enough to store your data on your own laptop, your own USB drives, or your own servers housed on premises at your business location. You need to be able to access your data anytime from anywhere.
Some may argue that data stored in the cloud is not secure, because you could lose access to it. That argument is no longer true, with reliable access to the Internet and with many major companies that offer cloud-based storage as part of their core business model.
However, you should consider that managing your data locally is itself a huge risk. If you experience a hardware malfunction or your physical property is destroyed, then your business will tank. But if your data is stored in the cloud, then depending which data hosting provider you go with, your data is more than likely accessible across multiple, redundant data centres and servers.
Developing Your Recovery Plan
Whether your data consists of Word documents, spreadsheets, databases, media files, you should set-up software on your machines that automatically copies or exports the data onto remote cloud-based servers.
Recovery of any data can be as easy as copying the data back from the cloud onto your own machine. Always ensure you have a backup for your backup, hiring an expert to look at hard drive data recovery specific to your business needs.
It is also imperative that you look into options that offer version control For example, if you edit a document, but need to revert back to a previous version, your data hosting provider should be such that it saves previous versions of your data. Whether the previous versions are stored in real-time, or once every 24-hours, really depends on how dynamic is the nature of the data that you are updating… how often you are updating it.
First Steps
While there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for a data recovery, the first thing you need to do is map out what type of data you need to store and what you would need to recover in case of data loss… How often is the data updated? What type of data is it?
Based on this, you can find a cloud-based hosting provider that can not only host the data for you, but also manage the backup and recovery of it.
