Disasters happen. Sometimes, it’s an area-wide natural disaster, like a flood or an earthquake. Other times, it’s something that happens only within your business, like a cyber attack or an employee error. Anything that takes out your power or compromises your computer systems can lead to data loss.
If the worst happens, your first priority is to ensure your data is safe. After that, you need to get back to business as quickly as possible and restore access to employees, clients, or anyone who needs it. To do that, you need a highly effective backup management plan with several key components.
1.Onsite Backup
Having an onsite repository for your data is critical. Having this basic backup at your location allows you to restore your data quickly. Your onsite backup is contained on a local storage device such as a hard drive, tapes, a DVD, or a CD. Onsite backup has some advantages:
Onsite backup is great for certain situations. For example, if you have a simple power outage, the data is right there, and you can restore it as soon as the power comes back on. However, a catastrophic event can destroy your storage device. You need another plan in case that happens.
2.Offsite Backup
An offsite data repository solves some of the problems inherent in onsite backup. Offsite backup can be done online and stored on secure servers in another location. Because the data is stored somewhere outside your business, it isn’t affected when your internal systems go down.
Ideally, the data is also stored somewhere outside your region so that it’s still there for you even if there’s a natural disaster that affects your entire area. Although onsite backup is generally considered the quickest to recover, the truth is that restoring from the right offsite system can be very fast, too.
The best solution is to have both onsite and offsite data repositories. That way, you’re covered whether the problem is at your location or in your entire region.
3.Regular Backup
Backing up your data only once a year or even once a quarter is a good way to lose all the data that comes in between backups. The best backup management plan includes backing up data regularly. Most experts recommend you back up your data once a week or even once every 24 hours.
4.Continuity Strategy
In life and in business, resilience is what keeps you going in the face of disaster. Resilience is what allows you to bounce back no matter what happens. For your company to be resilient, you need to have a continuity strategy. You need processes in place that allow you to get back to business as usual as quickly and smoothly as possible.
The standard now is to have Intelligent Business Continuity (IBC). Through IBC, your data is protected and secure. It can be recovered completely and instantly. Downtime is virtually eliminated, and you and clients don’t lose access to your services for any significant time.
5.Employee Participation
Don’t expect yourself to take care of all the backup tasks on your own if you have other employees using 
your systems. Every key employee needs to be involved. Yet, having too many different ideas about how to do things usually leads to confusion. It can also create a situation where data is easily lost. You not only need a plan; you need every key employee in your company on board.
To keep everyone on the same page, you need to create distinct backup and continuity policies. When you do that, your employees understand what to do. They’re also held accountable for doing their part in the backup process.
6.Compliance
If your business is a part of a heavily-regulated industry, backup compliance is absolutely necessary. You must have systems and processes in place that meet the requirements of your industry’s regulators. Traditional backup on tapes or discs won’t suffice. In fact, even online-only backup isn’t enough. You need a well-thought-out, comprehensive backup management plan, and you need to have policies in place that ensure that it’s followed explicitly.
7.Customized to Your Business
Your business is a unique entity. It has its own strengths, weakness, challenges, and goals. You need more than a cookie-cutter backup management plan. A customized plan will allow your business to avoid problems that are specific to your industry and individual business. It also makes it possible for your business to continue doing what it does best.
8.The Mobile Option
For certain businesses, mobile operation centers (MOCs) make sense as a part of a customized plan. Typically, mobile emergency operations centers are used during natural disasters. They’re used most often for large companies, especially those that are dispersed over several locations.
The MOC is a self-contained unit that arrives at the location where a disaster has happened. With it, it brings the resources needed to manage your data during the disaster and restore your systems to full operation. While not every business needs a MOC as a part of their plan, for some, it’s crucial.
Creating and implementing the ideal backup management plan takes thought, careful attention, and 
expert-level knowledge. You need both onsite and offsite backup for all your data, and you need to back up your data regularly. You need to develop policies that keep all your most trusted employees helping in a systematic way. With the right customized plan, you can stay compliant with regulations.
The time to make a backup management plan is now, before you lose the data that drives your business. Talk to JMARK for help developing the right plan for your unique business. Call us at 844-44-JMARK, email us at [email protected], or send us a message on our Contact Us page of this website. JMARK is a managed services provider based in Springfield, Missouri, serving Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, with clients nationwide.
