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The Top Five Worst Mistakes in Developing a Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

The Top Five Worst Mistakes in Developing a Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

The Top Five Worst Mistakes in Developing a Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

You don’t screw around when it comes to your backup strategy. It’s too easy to slip up when it comes to securing sensitive corporate data, and the results from such recklessness can result in fines, a damaged company brand, and much, much more. Even with such high stakes, companies still manage to succumb to some of the biggest sins in backup and disaster recovery. It always helps to know what to watch out for when building a successful BUDR strategy, so we’ve pieced together some of the more grievous mistakes that companies make. Take a look below.

Failure to Modify a Backup Strategy

The threats against your organization are unpredictable and elusive; rendering a static backup strategy ineffective. Additionally, trends in the backup landscape often force strategy adaptation as well. A significant increase in the popularity of cloud and virtualized solutions has highlighted the importance of moving away from outdated tape backup. Shifting trends in backup technologies pressure organizations to adapt to keep their backup strategy from becoming irrelevant, outdated, and at worst, ineffective.


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Forgetting the Multi-Layered Nature of Backup and Recovery

For as familiar as you become with your IT infrastructure, you should never forget the complexity of it all. Your system is comprised of files, operating systems, data centers, and servers that all serve a purpose in keeping your business afloat. To keep your business running during an outage, you’ll need to recover each of these individual layers – no doubt, that can get complex.

Your backup solution will involve the recovery, security, and testing of each piece of your IT infrastructure. Without a comprehensive understanding of each of these layers and how they interact to form a greater structure, your backup and recovery solution will likely be ineffective.

Too Much Emphasis on Backup and Not Enough on Recovery

Backup is only half the battle. It’s great that you’ve secured your data, but now that disaster has struck your IT infrastructure, will you know how to get your business up and running again? When you’re developing your backup strategy, it’s critical that you keep the processes of both backup and recovery in mind.

Underestimating Restoration Time

Continuing off my previous point, it’s critical that when you think about your strategy, you should take note of hwo long it will take to fully recover all of your backed up data. Between the loss in productivity, revenue, and customer trust, there’s a lot at stake when it comes to recovering your data in a timely manner. Your backup strategy should classify applications and files based on how vital they are to business operations and how long your business could effectively operate without them.

Failure to Test Your Backup Solution

One of the best practices in backup data recovery is frequent and thorough testing. Between walkthroughs to full-on simulations, these tests help build trust in your strategy as well as identify any possible weaknesses in your existing backup strategy. Roughly 32% of IT administrators fail to frequently test their backup solution. I should say that each case is unique, and that the frequency of your backup strategy is entirely dependent on the amount and nature of the data you’ll need to recover.

For more on backup and recovery solutions, check out the Solutions Review Backup and Recovery Buyer’s Guide.

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