By TYLER MOFFITT, senior security analyst at OpenText Cybersecurity
SMBs need to take backup seriously to avoid data loss and to protect against cyber threats. Developing a backup strategy, testing your backups, keeping backups offsite, encrypting your backups, and implementing a backup monitoring system are all critical steps to take on World Backup Day and beyond.
Develop a backup strategy: Start by assessing what data needs to be backed up and how frequently. Consider the type of data, its importance, and the impact of losing it. Then, decide on the backup location and method, such as cloud-based, physical backup, or a combination of both. I recommend the latter, but I can understand if budgets are in the way. That is also a primary reason why SMBs are targeted.
Test your backups: It’s essential to test your backups regularly to ensure they’re working correctly. Test backup data to make sure it can be recovered and is usable. Without these dry-run rehearsals, your backups could be useless or result in your team running around with their hair on fire during a time of crisis when you need to be calm and collected.
Keep backups offsite: If you store your backups onsite, they could be vulnerable to theft, fire, or natural disasters. Therefore, keeping backups offsite as well in a secure location is recommended. Cloud-based backup solutions offer this option to supplement any onsite solution.
Encrypt your backups: It’s important to encrypt your backups to prevent unauthorized access to the data. Encryption ensures that even if someone gains access to the backup data, they won’t be able to read it or use it for leverage on a leak site in data exfiltration cases, which are all too common.
Implement a backup monitoring system: A backup monitoring system helps you keep track of your backups and ensures they’re running correctly. It alerts you if there are any issues, such as failed backups or insufficient storage space. Having snapshots and a running history of versions of files is crucial as well. In case any of the most recent versions were to become compromised, you can have copies that you know will restore correctly.”
