Backup strategies for BCP and BRP
Aditi Joshi
Campbellsville University
Abstract
Backups are a very critical part of an organization’s business recovery and business continuity strategy. In the event that data becomes unavailable due to external manmade and natural vulnerabilities disaster recovery plans are necessary to avoid organizational disfunction. Basic protections like anti-virus software are not enough to protect valuable data. Hackers are always finding ways to get around it, if that happens, in order to avoid down time due to loss of data, organizations need to choose the correct back up strategy (Dobran, B. , 2018, April 27).
Keywords: BCP (Business Continuity Planning), BRP (Business Resumption Planning)
Backing up a company’s data has become imperative to make sure the company’s and its customer’s data is not at risk and because any loss or corruption of the same may lead to loss of credibility and hence, in turn cause a company to lose clients and to lose its business.
Factors while considering a backup strategy
Before choosing a backup strategy, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered. Some of them are :
1. Cost : While it is definitely important to consider a strategy that is cost effective, always keep in mind, the cost of breach of data.
2. Frequency : How often to backup depends on some other factors like how often and how much data the company generates.
3. Who has control of the backup planning? Ideally, depending upon how crucial backing up, there should be a knowledgeable person having the responsibility of making sure back up happens in a seamless manner.
4. What data risks are involved? Every company must think about malware and phishing attacks. However, those might not be the only risks you face. However, even physical dangers such as floods, earthquakes, depending upon where the company is located need to be considered.
5. Where to store the data? This brings us to the topic of on premises versus remote backups that we will discuss next.
Understanding On-Premises and Remote Backup
Broadly speaking there are two types of backup strategies : on-premises backup and remote backup.
On-Premises Backup
In an on-premises setup, the data is maintained on a physical drive and backed up manually or automatically at regular intervals.
With this setup, all the data is easily physically accessible, however, that is both a boon and a bane. While its always accessible, it is also more susceptible to loss such as theft or destruction due to natural (floods) or man-made calamities (fire)
Remote Backup
In remote backup, your computer automatically sends your data to a remote center at certain intervals. To perform a backup, you simply install the software on every computer containing data you want to back up, set up a backup schedule, and identify the files and folders to be copied. The software then takes care of backing up the data for you (Dobran, B. , 2018, April 27).
With remote backup solutions, the expense of purchasing backup equipment is avoided and in the event of a disaster you can still recover critical data. This makes remote backup ideal for smaller organizations that need to backup critical data such as patient information but lack the funding to be able to invest in physical backup equipment.
Another reason to go for remote backup is the prevention of manual intervention. A software scheduler won't forget to make an extra copy of a critical folder; an employee at the end of a busy week might. By taking the backup task out of your users' hands you avoid manual errors. (Dobran, B. , 2018, April 27).
However, on the other hand, the issue with remote backups is the fact that it relies heavily on internet access, if the internet goes down like in the vase of disaster where there is a power cut, there is no way to reliably access the data.
Another potential downside is the reliance on a third party with all your data. Hence, due diligence before choosing a third-party vendor is very important. It absolutely needs to be made sure that the vendor is reliable and has a reputation to deliver.
Best Practices for Backup
A good back up strategy has to be a tradeoff and the best bank for the buck when it comes to efficiency, cost and ease of setup. Some rules of thumb while developing a solid backup strategy are:
1. Plan your backup strategy : If needed, write and document your strategy including answers to questions like, when and how often do you want to back up. What do you want to back up?
2. Think beyond just office and its computers : Nowadays with employees having the freedom to work from anywhere else, office computers are not the only machines containing sensitive data, staff’s home computers, their mobile devices may contain sensitive data too.
3. Give highest priority to crucial data. Organizations need to decide on what is the most crucial data that they need to back up. Data collected could range from emails and internal documents to customers personal, healthcare and payments data. Not all data needs to be backed up every day, sensitive data should be backed up every day, while other data could be backed up at a different frequency such as once a week.
4. Storing and protecting your backups. When going for on-premise backup, it often makes sense to regularly roll the physical back up to a location outside the office which is more secure, something like a safety deposit. This is especially important if your area is prone to natural disasters. For example, if an office is located in a hurricane prone area, then it might not make sense to store your physical backup in the same city as your actual computers. If the office has multiple locations in different cities, it might make sense to use that to an advantage and distribute backups over locations.
5. Think about how you will access critical data and files
Consider what data would be most essential to have at your fingertips in an unexpected scenario. If you lose Internet connectivity, online services will be unavailable. What information or files would be key as you wait to regain Internet connectivity (which will enable you to restore from an offsite backup)? Where will you store those files? (Dobran, B. , 2018, April 27).
6. Test your backups before you need them.
Different Types of Backup
1. Differential Backup
This kind of backup basically takes a copy of anything that might have been updated since the last time a full backup was performed. The obvious advantage of this over a full backup is the reduced time and storage space needed for the backup, however, if the backup is not performed periodically enough, the size of the difference could become large and ultimately lead to a large backup time. For example, if you did a full back up on March 3rd, 2018; on March 4th only, files added or modified since 3rd will be backed up and on 5th again all files since 3rd will be backed up since that was when the last full backup was done.
2. Incremental Backup
The incremental backup process basically differs by taking a backup of anything modified or added since the last incremental backup ( and not just full backup) hence making the entire process even faster. However, it has to be implemented carefully because incremental backup relies on the fact that all earlier increments were successful, if something in the earlier backup failed there might be no other way to correct it than in fact run all the iterations again. Considering the same example, if you did a backup on March 3rd, 2018; on March 4th only, files added or modified since 3rd will be backed up and on 5th all files since 4th will be backed up since that was when the last incremental backup was done, trusting that the backup on 4th and 3rd was successful.
Below is a table to summarize the difference between the two strategies :
Backup strategy Back up basis Backup speed Space Needed Media Required
Full Backup Full Backup Slow Big Most recent backup only
Differential Backup Full Backup Medium Big Most recent full + differential backup
Incremental Backup Any previous backup Fast Small Most recent full / incremental backup
3-2-1 Strategy
In addition to the kind of back up strategy, organizations also need to make decisions on the number of backups. A lot of research has been done around the same and there are different strategies that a lot of organizations follow such as the 3-2-1 strategy. This strategy simply means that there should be at least 3 copies of the data, 2 could be local and 1 could be a remote copy. An example of a 3-2-1 strategy even for individual users is say an image that is on the users’ desktop, with a copy on an external hard drive and one stored remotely on a software like google photos which is a cloud-based backup.
Cloud Backup
Cloud backup is coming up as a cost-effective solution for traditional array – based backup techniques, however, for companies, data availability and security is possibly one of the most important factors and without the guarantee of whether data is encrypted and always available, cloud backup might always provide as a secondary, off site solution to a local copy of the backup. Cloud backup services include backing up to the public cloud such as Amazon web services or backing up to a service provider in a dedicated managed data center or a cloud to cloud backup where For data that lives in the cloud in software as a service (SaaS) applications, this practice copies that data to another cloud. Some of the obvious advantages that this strategy has is scalability, ease of management as service providers usually take care of a lot of the tasks which would traditionally be a responsibility of the devops or IT team and cost since for lower volumes of data, the cost is usually lesser as compared to on site or other forms of remote backup
(Y., 2017, September 25)
References :
Dobran, B. (2018, April 27). Data Backup Strategy: Ultimate Step By Step Guide for Your Business. Retrieved from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/data-backup-strategy-guide-business
Lo, K. (2012, April 15). Your Organization's Backup Strategy. Retrieved from https://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/your-organizations-backup-strategy
J. (2018, July 18). What's the Difference between Differential and Incremental Backups? Retrieved from https://www.easeus.com/backup-utility/differential-backup-vs-incremental-backup.html
Y. (2017, September 25). Backup Strategies: Why the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is the Best. Retrieved from https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Rouse, M. (n.d.). What is cloud backup (online backup)? – Definition from WhatIs.com. Retrieved from https://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-backup