Backing up on the Cloud - really?

Cloud backup is fast becoming the 'new' thing in businesses and whilst some companies use OneDrive via Microsoft or some favoring DropBox, the limits on data size, storage and costs per month means that many smaller businesses are trying to manage a backup system that doesn't truly met their needs.

Traditional physical backups are just fine but many businesses who have them tend not to have a secondary system in place. So when someone forgets to change the backups over, someone forgets to take the backup offsite, they get hit with a ransom virus or something awful happens to the offices - what do they do then? Well they trudge back through what they have and hope that they have what they need to get going again.

How often does a business actually check their backups and actually restore data from it to check that's it both backing up what it should and that in the event of an issue can restore what they need - I suspect the answer from many is, never.

So what can you do, well to start with put a secondary cloud backup system in place. A facility that backups up the key data overnight for the working day previous. And then put in place a disaster recovery plan. The plan doesn't have to include everything to start with; such as key contact numbers, insurances details, what to do if x happens etc, start with the basics; in the event of a data issue how are you going to keep going and lose as little amount of time as possible. Have a plan where you check monthly or bi-monthly the restore process, get a team member to randomly select certain documents or accounts data to restore and see if can be done and how long it takes. If you do this regularly you then reduce the time it takes to 'react' and thus ensure you can still operate with the least amount of downtime.

If you want advice or guidance on how to do this, then give us a call - and if you want an inexpensive online cloud backup facility talk to us; for 100gb of data it could cost as little as 40p per day to do!