Data loss can send panic down your spine, and encountering it often evokes images of customer outrages, public relations nightmares and work stoppages that follow. This is why data backup and recovery measures have long been businesses best practice across the globe and why the auditing standards have evolved to ensure companies that manage and generate data do so reliably and responsibly.
The race to cloud, while enormously changing the way we think about sharing and managing data, should not change the importance of data backup and recovery. Most companies leverage the cloud wrongfully usually assume that the cloud vendors have backup and recovery plans covered for them. However, the truth is that these activities remain mandatory upon every organization, irrespective of where their data is stored, accessed, or managed.
No geographic region, industry, or company is exempt from losing data, hence without a good backup plan, anyone can be a victim of this circumstance. According to the World Backup Day 2016 report, the energy, banking, IT, insurance, pharmaceuticals, financial, retail, and manufacturing sectors suffered a combined data loss worth $13.4 million.
In this article, we are going to look at the four Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data backup practices for organizations of all sizes and shapes so that your organization can understand how SaaS data protection is important.
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Keep more than just one copy in the cloud.
Wisdom dictates that you should have multiple copies of your data backed up in multiple separate locations. This same logic should be extended to the cloud too. You will want to have a distinct copy of all your cloud-based data stored securely in a separate cloud structure for data safety purposes.
In case, you have migrated already to the cloud, be more agile, and enhance collaboration. Cloud-to-cloud back enables you to continue leveraging benefits of the cloud computing while keeping another copy of your SaaS data safe in a secure separate cloud structure that ensures data integrity even if something uncertainty happens in the original cloud server.
Most cloud vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce, or Google have very high standards for data redundancy and security. However, just in case such as natural disaster happens and your data disappears, it is important that you backup your data into another cloud structure just to ensure availability and safety of your data. Even in the cloud, companies must be prepared to give answers to the standards surrounding data accessibility and management. Cloud-to-cloud data backup helps companies pass audits by securing data with solutions, which are as stringent as retentions and backup policies for data managed on premises.
Employing a third-party backup solution enables you to leverage credentials such as:
- Cloud Security Alliance Membership
- SSAE 16 Compliance
- Privacy and Security Certification, such as TRUSTe
- Strong encryption ciphers
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Educate and support end users with a user-friendly backup
Data loss does not have to be catastrophic in order to interrupt business operations. In fact, daily user errors such as accidental deletion account for approximately two-thirds of data loss, according to Aberdeen research. The best way to avoid wasted resources and time due to SaaS data loss is to train your employees properly on the tools they use daily, like Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Apps and equip them with a backup and recovery solution that includes the end-user enabled restore.
When you empower end-users to solve issues pertaining to their own data loss, IT admins no longer need to perform recovery and restore tasks.
You need to ensure that you find a backup and recovery plan that is user-friendly and intuitive. Here is a list of some key features that will help make the backup and recovery for non-IT and IT employees as simple as possible:
- Searchability
- On-page or in-app restore
- Daily, automated backup
- Granular, point-in-time restore
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Don’t just backup your data-think metadata too!
Metadata plays a key role in enabling control and collaboration, containing information about tags, ownership, labels, and sharing settings. All these are crucial for allowing the right people externally or internally, to find and use SaaS data easily.
Unfortunately, not all backup plans, including the ones provided by the cloud vendors include metadata. This can leave users frustrated and confused when they realize that they will not be able to access the data back into their cloud applications just as it was before, with customizations, settings and the associated data attached.
Without metadata, your data does not have the framework required to provide useful information. You need to find a solution that includes customization and metadata in your backup in case, you want the recovery process to go smoothly.
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Keep monitoring your backups to check the health of your company’s data
Can you imagine how it would feel when you attempt to restore your lost data only to come to the terms that it had not been backed up well due to data corruption, an oversight, or other errors? All data backups should be monitored closely by the admins using dashboards, email notifications, and status reporting included with your backup solution. You need to pay close attention to these error reports to enable you to get a true picture of your company’s data health and address this.
Conclusion
With all these said and done, the bottom line is that you need to get a serious data backup provider that will help you put the best practices your data backup and recovery into action. With data recovery services, you should no longer be worried about SaaS data loss, compliance in the cloud and business continuity.
Author: Robin Jago is editor in chief at TTR Data Recovery. He is a data scientist, and has decades of experience in writing posts on big data management and analytics.