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Year's best practices for backup feature ransomware, SaaS
Backup best practices range from making sure your backups are safe from ransomware to being able to move on in the face of a failure. Take advantage of the advice and products.
Backup is having a moment.
That's a good thing. The negative piece, though, is that many organizations are exploring or reexploring backup because of the volume of threats to data.
It's been said often: "Data is the new oil." Clearly, then, it's important to protect that data and employ best practices for backup.
Chances are, if you're looking for a specific kind of backup technology or process in a product, you'll find it. Data protection vendors, some recently backed by huge amounts of funding, are making their offerings faster and smarter.
But how can you use these products best and what are some best practices for backup? In 2019, SearchDataBackup presented a number of tip articles and here we provide five of the best and most relevant.
Hopefully, backup's moment will continue -- not because cyberthreats remain or natural disasters keep threatening, but because backup is good for business.
Don't let ransomware take down your backup
New forms of ransomware continue to pop up and organizations need to be ready. One of the recent trends is ransomware that lies dormant and later attacks backups. As a result, it's important to know how to protect not only your primary storage, but also your backups. In this article on protecting backups from ransomware, Nick Cavalancia explains how to apply a layered defense and how to use products that prevent and notify. Get out in front of this type of data protection with best practices for backup, because ransomware is a serious threat and you don't want to be playing from behind.
All about that SaaS backup
It seems like everyone is using at least one SaaS platform, whether it's Office 365, G Suite or any of the many other popular cloud-based services. Now, best practices for backup must include SaaS protection. Those platform providers often offer only the most basic form of protection. The good news is that many established and new vendors have recognized this trend and are selling SaaS-specific backup. In this article on backing up SaaS, Cavalancia describes why it's so important and what you should consider when analyzing vendors.
Bounce back from backup failures
Backups fail -- it happens. The key is moving forward rather than dwelling on the problem. At a time when no downtime is essentially table stakes, it's easy to panic when a backup fails. But there are ways to turn the tables and at least get some data back. John Edwards speaks to vendors and experts about the keys to recovering from a backup failure and the importance of testing. If you should ever face a backup failure, make sure one of your next moves is to make it less likely such an incident should happen again.
What to do when backup volume gets high
As mentioned previously, data is the new oil. With that proclamation, though, comes large and often excessive amounts of data, not only in primary storage, but in backups. Organizations tend to keep more data than they need and have a hard time purging. So, what are some best practices for backup of huge volumes? Brien Posey provides three steps for how you can handle big backup data sets. Try to shrink the data footprint as best you can -- it'll make the job that much easier in the future.
Help for hybrid hitches
You have many options for backup. They don't stop at one platform -- many organizations are using a hybrid backup approach. The use of both the cloud and local storage for backup can be beneficial, providing redundancy in the event that one platform fails, for example. However, you need to be wary of potential pain points, including cost, bandwidth and complexity. Here, Posey details how to get around hybrid backup challenges.
