Backups and disaster recovery planning: what are the best practices?
Backup methods, risk management, DRP (disaster recovery plan) and BCP (business continuity plan)… The recent fire in one of the data centers of France’s leading hosting provider has reminded everyone – businesses, local authorities and institutions – that no one is immune to disaster, and that it is essential to anticipate any type of incident.
Rescuing your business: crisis management, DRP and PC
The importance of drawing up a disaster recovery plan (DRP) and a business continuity plan (BCP ) was brought home to us by the fire that struck one of the data centers of France’s leading hosting and cloud computing company in March 2021. After all, whatever the solutions chosen (servers, cloud…), computer data remains stored on physical media. And physical media means vulnerability to damage, incidents and attacks.
Fires, floods, electrical damage, ramsomware attacks… Crisis management enables you to identify potential risks, target upstream issues related to this type of event and measure their impact on your organization.
The resulting DRPs and BCPs will enable your company or organization to put in place the actions needed to get back up and running with as little damage as possible, or even to maintain a minimum level of activity in degraded mode. They will also define the players who can intervene and support you: insurers, crisis management specialists, data recovery laboratories, etc.
Data backup for disaster recovery
Data backup solutions and procedures are an integral part of BCPs and DRPs. They can even, along with data recovery operations, be the subject of dedicated PCI (plan de continuité informatique) and PRI (plan de reprise informatique).
From preventive measures to curative operations, preserving computer data is what will enable the affected company or organization to get back up and running as quickly as possible. A few good practices and simple rules will enable you to mitigate the negative consequences of a disaster or incident:
- at least two data backups. In the case of datacenter storage, data redundancy on a second remote site is required;
- keep a remote (i.e. off-site) copy of your data backup, disconnected from any network; this precaution will make sense in the event of fire, flood or ransomware attack. Tape backup is still a tried and tested, reliable solution.
- test the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan and/or business continuity plan, and first check that data backups are being carried out correctly. It is not uncommon (and dramatic!) to discover in the event of a disaster or incident that backups were not up to date…
