How to Implement a Successful Data Backup Routine

Data backups are absolutely essential for small and large businesses alike to prevent downtime, disruption, and delays. Without smart backup solutions, your company’s information becomes vulnerable to cyber attacks, hardware malfunction, and natural disasters.

If you’re looking for ways to implement a successful data backup routine, you’ve come to the right place.

Identifying What Needs to be Backed Up

First things first, you must identify exactly what needs to be backed up. Any information or data that is critical to the successful operation of your business should be protected. This includes data relating to financial, customer, or vendor records, tax information, human resources, and employee records, and anything else you can think of that might impact the functioning of your business.

Let’s look at an example. If you own a growing accounting firm, the last thing you’d want to do is lose the carefully detailed records you’ve been keeping for your clients over the years.

Identifying How to Protect Your Data

Next, consider a few options to help you protect your data.

• Cloud Backup: This solution makes backing up your data easy, is incredibly cost-effective, and promotes a more flexible work environment.
• Infrastructure Optimization: You can trust our experienced team of professionals to optimize your IT infrastructure to strengthen and improve your system’s manageability.

Most companies choose to combine both strategies to create an optimal data protection and storage solution.

Identifying When to Backup Your Data

Now that you’re familiar with what to backup and how to do it, you need to determine how frequently you might want to do it. Regular data backups are one of the key elements of an effective data backup strategy. However, regular might indicate something different for different business owners.

How often do your files and folders change? Data can be indicated as hot, warm, or cold, and based on its ‘temperature’, you may need to back it up more frequently.

• Hot Data: Frequently accessed on fast storage
• Warm Data: Less frequently-accessed on somewhat slower storage
• Cold Data: Rarely-accessed on the slowest storage available

If you utilize hot data frequently, like an investment firm might, you would want to rely on daily backups to manage and protect a lot of important information. Contrarily, if your organization has a lot of cold data, a monthly differential backup may be better suited for your needs.

Implementing a successful data backup routine doesn’t have to be complicated. Follow these simple steps, or contact us for more information on how your organization can protect its data for years to come.