Backup: Don't Just Set It And Forget It

Often times I hear my Minneapolis cloud IT clients with a dream for their data backup, "set it and forget it" as legendary infomercial king Ron Popeil would say. That is a great dream and often one that IT and cloud services providers sell to their clients, even I've been guilty in past. However, data backup really isn't a product to set and forget, it's a process.

You wouldn't want to implement a high end security camera system in your home or business and then only check if the system was actually recording once you've been robbed. You would test the camera quality, recordings, and playback to ensure if you are robbed you have the villain on tape for the authorities.

Backup is different from other cloud or technology solutions since the ability to recover your data can be the difference between a long prosperous company and going bankrupt. According to the Central Illinois Business Journal, 7 out of 10 companies that experience a massive data loss are no longer in business after 3 years. I'm sure many of these businesses had a backup solution but never thought to test it.

Just like you would test your security system prior to a robbery, you should work with your backup vendor to test the recovery and restore process annually at a minimum. The provider should be more than happy to schedule this with you and take you through a sample recovery.

During this test you should look to measure the following:

• How quick is the vendor able to restore access to your data?
• Is all of the data intact, accessible, and up to date?
• If this data loss were real, would this backup be sufficient to continue to run the business uninterrupted?

Remember, Ron Popiel was talking about a chicken rotisserie, not your critical business data when he said, "Set it and forget it!".


Brendon Liner is a founding partner of nology, a Minneapolis IT and Cloud Solutions Provider helping businesses keep their critical data safe and secure.