1. No Backup

This is the most obvious, yet the easiest mistake to fix. If you don’t have any kind of backup, you are not alone. As Ponemon Institute reported, 39% of small and medium-sized companies don’t have this covered. Disasters of any sort, whether simple human errors, natural disasters, or ransomware attacks, will affect your business one way or another. There is no knowing how and when a disaster will occur. Fortunately, there is a way to diminish thus negative impact. The first step is to put some backup in place.

2. Physical storage = physical danger

Physical storage, such as discs and tapes, may seem like the most reliable backup system, because they are the only type that is tangible and visible. However, physical storage equals physical dangers, such as fires and floods, and even human error, such as discs breaking, overheating, or being misplaced. Other storage, like the cloud, is intangible. Therefore, it gives an advantage to its users by defying physical disasters.

3. ‘Sync’ vs. ‘Backup’

Many people get confused about syncing and backing-up their data. If you think that by syncing your files and documents you do not need to back them up, you’re wrong! When you ‘sync’ a file, it simply means that if you make any changes in a file on one device, the same changes will be made to a file that is synced to other devices.

4. Consistency is key

The average failure rate when backing up all data is 75%. Installing some kind of data backup system and calling it a day won’t be enough. Backing up data calls for consistency, a thought and a plan. For the average small business, a weekly backup is often enough. Daily backups are recommended for remote work, regular work with client data and/or for businesses in regulated industries. Long story short, the more data produced and the more significant the data is, the more frequent the backups should occur.

5. Check your files

Setting automated backups might help most of the time, but let’s be one step ahead. Incorporate checking saved data to ensure that they are working correctly. Generally, automated processes sometimes end up failing over time – making sure everything is working as it should be is vital.

6. Try it out!

Doing a backup and checking it from time to time are only the first steps. If you can’t restore anything, you’re dead in the water. You need to ensure that those backups will work, if and when you need them.

7. Backup for your backup

Because backups are so critically important, you should construct your backup architecture in a way that avoids (at least as much as possible) having a single point of failure. If possible, have a backup of your backups. You never want to find yourself in a situation in which you did not backup the night before and, you are just praying that the server doesn’t fail that day, because you have nothing to fall back on.

8. Make room for your data

This is another very common mistake; hard drives and cloud drives that are almost completely full. When this happens a backup cannot be fully performed. It is important to always ensure that there is sufficient storage on whatever devices or locations that you use for your critical backups.

9. Neatly organised folders

Cluttered data may not have any impact on your cloud backup process, but it will sure turn into a nightmare when it’s time for a restore. Most of the time, you’ll restore several key files, so you need to be able to find them promptly. As such, you need to sort out your information in easily manageable clusters. The less complex, the better. You need all employees that have access to the backups to find everything as easy as possible.

10. Close your apps before it’s too late

Not every cloud backup service offers the possibility of backing up your files while they’re open. That means if you leave your “in progress” spreadsheets and documents open overnight, your file might not be present in the backup. Now, a single document may not be such a problem, but what if you forget an entire database? Basically, your system has skipped a crucial backup. So, remember to go the extra mile and close such apps.

The post 10 Data Backup Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid first appeared on Intellope.

The conflagration in Strasbourg in Eastern France took down millions of websites across Europe and Africa, including government agency portals, banks, retailers, news websites, and an estimated 2% of the entire .FR country domain. Despite a quick response, 100 local firefighters were neither able to contain the blaze nor identify its cause.

Backup needed for SaaS data

In addition to downed websites, many OVHcloud customers reported prolonged email outages and significant data losses. By mid-day, OVHcloud had notified major customers that they should activate their disaster recovery plans, and by evening, announced that two of the affected data centers would not resume operation until Monday, March 15, and a third would remain offline until Friday, March 19. The fourth appears to have been completely destroyed. The Strasbourg centers were among OVHcloud’s 17 data centers in France and 32 globally.

The horrific fire comes at a time when many companies and government institutions are moving more and more of their critical business processes and associated data to SaaS applications running on cloud infrastructure supplied by OVHcloud, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the like. And while big cloud providers are capable of fairly quick failover to and load-sharing with their other data centers, the outages experienced by OVHcloud’s customers show that, as a default, those providers do not assume responsibility for providing similar resiliency for applications and data. As a business, you may effectively outsource your data center hardware and operating systems to a cloud provider, but you still own the responsibility to protect your data.

Considering disaster recovery

The OVHcloud fire is a textbook example of the kind of natural or manmade disaster for which disaster recovery scenarios are designed. In an era of climate change, the probability of such events is going up worldwide, with droughts increasing the chances of wildfires, destructive weather events like tornados and hurricanes increasing in violence and frequency, and sea-level rise threatening increased flooding of coastal areas.

But those are not the only potential disasters that may lead to data loss or destruction. Increasingly sophisticated cybercriminal gangs mount hundreds of thousands of malware attacks per day around the world, many using ransomware to lock up company data forever if an extortion fee is not paid. Hostile state actors have mounted large-scale, sophisticated attacks on software supply chains and popular email servers that have the potential to bring down hundreds of thousands of critical applications.

The past year also saw a sharp rise in the number of data-loss incidents due to non-malicious configuration errors made by tech staffers. Many of these can be attributed to their inexperience with managing the cloud data stores that businesses hastily migrated to in the wake of the pandemic and surge in remote work. For many businesses, especially smaller ones, a disaster-driven outage of days or weeks is an existential threat to the business.

Final thought

The OVHcloud fire is a timely reminder that businesses of every size should revisit both their data protection and disaster recovery plans to ensure that they are adequately protecting their SaaS applications against downtime and the associated data against damage or destruction.

Modern DR offerings like cloud-based disaster recovery as a service now offer affordability and an attractive return on investment that were once only available to large enterprises.

The post Backup: Lessons from OVHcloud’s data center fire first appeared on Intellope.

What is cloud storage and how does it work?

Cloud storage is a type of storage model where data is stored on remote servers which can be accessed from any device which is connected to the internet, leaving your personal hard drive space free. Cloud storage is maintained, operated and managed by a cloud storage service provider.

Is cloud storage really so popular?

Cloud Storage is becoming more and more popular as employees use their computers and smartphones for more of their daily tasks resulting in the data stored on these devices increasing exponentially.  As a result, the number of documents, videos, PDFs and other files can become overwhelming and too much to store on local drives or memory cards. Companies are now searching for new ways to store files, ways that don’t require expensive purchases of hard drives and other storage devices. This is where cloud storage services have stepped in to help by providing businesses free or low-cost alternatives to expensive file storage hardware.

Related:

The Best Cloud Storage Services and their pros and cons

Acronis

Acronis – Cyber Files – In two versions, Backup and Protect. Founded in Singapore in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008, Acronis now has more than 1,500 employees in 33 locations in 18 countries. It was built to avoid downtime, data loss and security breaches at a lower cost.

Only one solution combines backup and antimalware together to protect you from today’s threats – from accidents to failures to attacks

Acronis Cyber Files is licensed as a subscription with few capacity and duration options. Digital life protection starting at 49,99 €.

Box

• Box – is a California based cloud content management and file sharing service for businesses and was founded in 2005.

Free storage space up to 10 GB, online file editing & preview, deleted file recovery, live chat support, mobile app and Microsoft outlook integration.

one of the more expensive cloud storage platforms as costs start at $17 per month. The file size limit is only 2GB and there is no end-to-end encryption.

• Dropbox Business – is also a California based company founded in 2007 that offers cloud storage, file synchronization for personal cloud and client software.

Pros – less expensive compared to Box with price starting from $10 per month, public file and folder sharing, deleted file recovery, mobile app.

Cons – free storage only up to 2GB,no online editing in free accounts, no outlook integration and no end-to-end encryption.

• Google Drive – is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google, Launched on April 24, 2012. Google Drive allows users to store files on their servers, synchronize files across devices and share files.

Pros – free storage up to 15GB, file size limit up to 5 TB, online file editing and preview, deleted file recovery, public file and folder sharing and Microsoft outlook integration.

Cons – no password protected shared links, no live chat support, no end-to-end encryption and no digital right management.

• OneDrive – is a file hosting and synchronization service operated by Microsoft and comes as part of its suite of Office Online services which was launched in 2007.

Pros – The cost of 1TB of storage space is $6.99 which includes an online file preview and edit accompanied with a mobile app, Microsoft outlook integration and end-to-end encryption.

Cons – free storage space up to 5GB, shared links aren’t password protected, no live chat support and no automated backups.

Related:

Conclusion

There are so many cloud storage providers out there for users to choose from however, we have narrowed them down to just five based on popularity. Google drive is the overall best service for personal use, followed by OneDrive. The others are also good however, they are rather expensive and aren’t quite as secure. Acronis Cyber Cloud is something different. Has two versions for private and business users with priority for security and functionality. This is something that we highly recommend for further demand.

Thank you for reading and for more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at intellope.com. You may just find what you need to boot your business forward.

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