Backup and Recovery: Designing Your Plan

So different types of bad things that could happen - fire or flood, hardware failure, accidental deletion, virus and cryptoware. These will all help you if you have a data backup. And in a lot of these conditions, like fire and flood or cryptoware or viruses offsite, you want to make sure that you’re disconnected from the network when you’re trying to restore, because if you get something like on your server, you get a cryptoware, keeping stuff on the network will probably end up spreading it further and further through your network, so it’s usually a good idea to try to disconnect it from the network and try to slow down or stop the spread.

Now in terms of back when we talked about hardware and software, so a good hardware solution, for example, would be Nimble Storage. Now Nimble Storage is a ray of hard drives. And this could be a one U that goes in your rack, a single rack item or you could have of a multiple U storage, which means it takes multiple slots in a server rack. And these all depend on your use case. Now Nimble Storage is good. It’s by HP. They’re reliable. They’re pretty easy to use. You can back up a lot of data. You can also cluster these things, say you have a giant one like the one in picture here, you have more data than that.

Well, you get a multiple of these units and you can have it backing up together. And you could even have multiple at different locations, say you have offices A, B, and C, you have three Nimble Storage units at each site. And say A is backing up to B, and B is backing up to C, and C is backing up to A, so you have some sort of redundancy there. That is totally possible. And I did mention previously, Microsoft Azure and aws servers, these are good cloud backup storage. And you could use this in conjunction with your existing storage, say, your Nimble Storage.

So now you have on site, you have an offsite at a different location, and then you have one in the cloud. So you have at least three backups. It’s not three different type of media. But at least you have three solid backup solutions. And again, it’s onsite and offsite. Now in wrapping up, your disaster plan should always include your backup and recovery plan. Having a data recovery is critical for getting everything back up and running quickly and efficiently. Offsite and onsite, it’s important to include offsite backup, if you currently have or planning on have an onsite backup. Disasters happen and having your data in multiple locations can help save you. Now there’s also incremental and full backup.

While incremental backup is good for daily backups, you want to make sure you periodically run a full backup also. And also test and retest. Having a backup strategy and data backup is critical. But testing your backup recovery is just as important. Make sure that you’re testing those backups, and make sure that they do work and they are operating the way you expect them to. Now this was about data back up. In the next video, we’re going to be talking about developing and learning from your attack. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.