🐡 Don’t lose your data - Boardroom hot topics

After the 180 mph winds of Typhoon Pongsona, businesses are prepared, more than ever, to handle a natural disaster. We have procedures for keeping gas in our generators, batteries for flashlights, case of spam….hmmm where did those go? Business continuity plans were made, and emergency response committees were assembled. Often times, these plans do not have ransomware recovery measures built-in, and are due for a refresh.

There have been significant advances in backup strategies. Attacks have gotten exponentially more sophisticated, and our systems attack surface has grown since COVID, and Pongsona. It’s notable to mention that the amount of data we are storing has grown, increasing the chance of corruption or media failure.

💡 Attack surface is your exposure to a hacker. Any new application or software subscription increases your attack surface. Adding more computers, mobile devices, users, and WiFi access points are other examples.

There are two important metrics in data backup that are used to measure the amount of data loss and downtime that an organization can tolerate during a disaster or cyber event.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

RTO is the amount of time that an organization can afford to be without access to its critical data and applications during a disaster. It is the maximum acceptable downtime that an organization can tolerate before it starts to experience significant losses.

For example, if an organization has an RTO of 4 hours, it means that in the event of a disaster, the organization should be able to recover its critical systems and data within 4 hours, and resume normal operations.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

RPO is the amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate during a disaster. It is the maximum amount of data that an organization can afford to lose without suffering significant losses.

For example, if an organization has an RPO of 1 hour, it means that in the event of a disaster, the organization should be able to recover its data up to the last hour before the disaster occurred.

When an organization is on the same page on these hot topics, there is a significant increase in the chances of recovery. Determining the RTO and RPO in an organization will likely affect every other decision in designing an effective backup system.

💾 Don't Lose Your Data: Learn How to Use the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy!

For smaller organizations, the 3-2-1 backup strategy is a data backup strategy that is widely used to keep data safe and secure from accidental loss or data corruption. The strategy involves creating three copies of your data, storing those copies in two different storage mediums, and keeping one copy in an offsite location.

The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy Explained

🥉Three Copies of Your Data

The first step is to create three copies of your data. This means that you will have the original copy of your data and two backup copies. In the event that something happens to one, you will still have two other copies to work with.

🥈Two Different Storage Mediums

The secondly, store your copies of data in two different storage mediums. For example, you might store one copy of your data on an external hard drive and another copy on a cloud-based server. This ensures that if one storage medium fails or becomes damaged, you will still have another copy of your data.

🥇 Offsite Location

The final step in the 3-2-1 backup strategy is to keep one copy of your data in an offsite location. This could be a physical location, such as a safe deposit box, or a virtual location, such as a cloud-based server. The purpose of keeping a copy of your data offsite is to protect against events such as theft, fire, or natural disasters that could destroy all copies of your data at once.

Benefits of the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

The 3-2-1 backup strategy offers several benefits, including:

• Improved Data Security: By creating multiple copies of your data and storing them in different locations, you improve the security of your data and reduce the risk of data loss or corruption.

• Efficient Recovery: If you do experience data loss or corruption, having multiple copies of your data makes it easier and faster to recover your lost data.

• Cost-Effective: While the 3-2-1 backup strategy does require creating multiple copies of your data, it is still a cost-effective way to protect against data loss and corruption.

💡The 3-2-1 backup strategy is widely used in the industry as a trusted method for data backup & security, and is an essential part of any comprehensive cybersecurity plan.