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How to Create a Data Backup Plan in 14 Easy Steps

Do you think that having a data backup plan nowadays is crucial for businesses? Whether you’re a business owner, a decision-maker, or an IT professional, implementing a structured backup strategy is imperative.

These noteworthy statistics shed light on the importance of a robust backup plan in ensuring business continuity. Backblaze recorded a significant increase in the average hard drive failure rate, rising from 1.54% in the previous quarter to 2.28% in the second quarter of 2023.

Simultaneously, a UK survey exposed a concerning fact: roughly 42% of medium-sized companies and 30% of large businesses do not have off-site backups in place. These figures underscore the critical role that a well-established backup strategy plays in safeguarding businesses from data loss and disruptions.

Imagine the potential consequences of losing critical business data, sensitive documents, or essential files due to hardware failures, cyberattacks , or unforeseen accidents. A well-designed data backup plan is your business’s ultimate safeguard.

We’ve outlined 14 practical steps to help you create a robust backup plan. Follow these guidelines to safeguard your business’s digital assets effectively.

Step 1: Define Your Backup Goals and Objectives

The very first step in crafting a robust data backup plan is to clearly define your goals and objectives. This entails understanding what data you need to back up, where you intend to store these backups, the frequency at which you’ll perform backups, and who will be responsible for executing and overseeing this process.

Additionally, it’s essential to establish a budget for your backup plan and decide how you will track the entire backup operation. This meticulous planning phase forms the bedrock of a successful backup strategy.

Step 2: Choose the Right Storage Options

Choosing the right storage options plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of your backup plan. There are many choices available, each with its own set of pros and cons. Here are some primary options to explore:

a. Local Disks and External USB Drives

Local disks and external USB drives are great for quick backups and are particularly well-suited for smaller-scale operations. They offer speed and independence from network connectivity, making them ideal for scenarios like system failures and data corruption. Although they are suitable for regular data backups, don’t forget to include Windows system backups for a comprehensive recovery strategy.

b. NAS and SAN Solutions

Network-attached storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions provide centralized storage options for backups. They simplify the recovery process, especially when combined with granular recovery capabilities. When considering these solutions, ensure that Windows system backups are part of your overall backup strategy.

c. Tape-Based Backups

Tape-based backups are ideal for long-term archiving and offer excellent security as an offsite storage option. Modern tape technologies offer efficient compression, making them suitable for large data volumes. As you evaluate tape-based backups, don’t forget to incorporate Windows system backups into your plan to ensure complete system recovery in case of disasters.

d. Cloud-Based Storage

Cloud storage provides a cost-effective offsite backup solution dependent on internet connectivity. It offers scalability but faces susceptibility to cyberattacks. Notably, about 84% of businesses have adopted cloud backups , rising to 93% for small and mid-sized businesses. When considering cloud storage, include critical data in your strategy to safeguard your computing environment.

When deciding on the right storage solution, it’s crucial to check your Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), and specific organizational needs. The industry-recognized 3-2-1 backup strategy—maintaining three backup copies in two locations, with one being offsite—often proves to be a prudent choice.

Step 3: Extend Your Backup Scope

Your data backup plan should encompass a wide spectrum of data sources beyond just office computers. Consider data stored on employees’ computers and mobile devices, corporate storage networks, cloud-hosted resources, emails, websites, and even physical hard copy documents. Identifying all data locations, regardless of format, is essential for comprehensive backup planning.

Step 4: Automate Backup Operations

Automation plays a central role in your data backup plan’s success. Tasks need automation at various intervals—daily, weekly, monthly, or annually—to maintain backup consistency and systematic testing. It simplifies monitoring backup tasks, reporting outcomes (both successes and failures), analyzing and resolving errors, managing backup storage , and optimizing backup schedules. Automation streamlines processes and mitigates the risk of human errors.

Incorporating automation into your backup strategy not only simplifies routine tasks but also enhances overall efficiency. It reduces the potential for errors and ensures that your backups run consistently, providing a reliable safety net for your data.

Step 5: Organize Backup Administration

Efficient data administration is essential in backup management. Establish a dedicated team responsible for overseeing scheduling, addressing vulnerabilities, adapting to business needs, educating team members, and regularly testing backups. This ensures functionality and data protection.

Step 6: Test Your Backups Regularly

Testing is a critical part of your backup plan. Regular tests ensure functionality and effectiveness when needed. Factors to consider include testing frequency, result analysis, strategy adjustments, and maintaining a documented testing plan. Consistency is key, as it’s better for failures to happen during testing than in a data loss crisis.

Step 7: Secure a Reliable Backup Provider

According to the 2022 Ransomware Trends Report , a staggering 97% of ransomware attacks aimed to infect backup repositories. This statistic underscores the critical importance of selecting a reliable backup and recovery vendor.

After defining your backup priorities and crafting a comprehensive strategy, the final step is to consider various factors such as data protection features, pricing, supported platforms, and technical compatibility when choosing the right vendor. Exploring free trials or demos offered by vendors can provide valuable insights into their solutions. Trusting a dependable backup solution is crucial to safeguarding your data.

Step 8: Implement Encryption for Data Security

In an era where data breaches pose a persistent threat, incorporating encryption into your data backup plan is essential. Encrypting your backups guarantees that, even if they fall into unauthorized hands, the data remains secure and unintelligible. Use robust encryption algorithms to safeguard sensitive information, and ensure that encryption keys are stored separately from the backups for enhanced security.

Step 9: Establish Data Retention Policies

To maintain an organized and efficient backup strategy, define clear data retention policies. Determine how long you will retain different types of data backups, considering legal requirements, compliance regulations, and business needs. Establishing retention guidelines helps prevent data clutter and ensures that you are only retaining what is necessary.

Step 10: Audit Backup Activities

Continuous monitoring and auditing of your backup activities are essential for maintaining the integrity of your data backup plan. Install a system for tracking backup jobs, verifying their success, and detecting any anomalies or issues promptly. Regular audits help identify potential weaknesses and ensure compliance with your backup policies.

Step 11: Document Disaster Recovery Procedures

Alongside your backup strategy, it’s vital to establish well-documented disaster recovery procedures. Create clear, step-by-step instructions for data recovery in the event of a disaster. These instructions should specify who is responsible for carrying out these procedures and outline the necessary resources. Keep these documents up-to-date, regularly reviewing and revising them to align with changes in your infrastructure and technology.

Step 12: Consider Redundancy in Backup Locations

To enhance the resilience of your backup plan, consider redundancy in backup locations. Having multiple backup copies stored in geographically diverse locations ensures that your data remains accessible even in the face of catastrophic events like natural disasters. Redundancy reduces the risk of data loss from location-specific incidents.

Step 13: Employee Training and Awareness

Invest in training and awareness programs for your employees to ensure they understand the importance of data backups and their role in the process. Educated employees are more likely to follow best practices and report any issues promptly, contributing to the overall success of your data backup strategy.

Step 14: Periodic Review and Testing of the Entire Plan

Regularly revisit and review your entire data backup plan. Technology evolves, and so do your data needs. Periodic reviews help you adapt to changing circumstances, technologies, and cybersecurity threats . Additionally, continue testing your backups periodically to ensure that they remain functional and meet your recovery objectives.

In conclusion, implementing a comprehensive data backup plan with these 14 key steps is essential for safeguarding your valuable information and ensuring the continuous functioning of your business.

Delaying action in the field of data security is a risk that no one can afford. By proactively embracing these guidelines, you not only establish a robust backup strategy but also gain the peace of mind that comes with knowing your data is well-protected. Remember that a well-structured plan not only shields your data but also provides the assurance of swift recovery whenever the need arises.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.

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6 Proven Strategies for Building Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans

Introduction:

In today’s unpredictable business landscape, a data disaster can strike at anytime. Whether it’s the result of natural disasters, operational errors, or the ever-looming threat of cyberattacks, the potential for data loss is a constant concern. Despite advancements in hardware resiliency, severe weather conditions like flooding, power outages, and power surges can still wreak havoc on technology, leading to disruptive interruptions and devastating losses.

Adding to the complexity, cybercriminals persistently seek to exploit sensitive business data. The repercussions of losing access to vital data and files can be crippling to business operations. The cost, both in terms of time and money, involved in attempting to recover these assets can severely impact companies.

So, how can businesses ensure they are adequately prepared for a data disaster? 

This blog post will outline a 6-step process recommended by data backup and recovery services experts for creating a comprehensive backup plan.

By diligently following these steps, businesses can enhance the resilience and redundancy of their IT systems, minimize data loss, and ensure the uninterrupted continuity of their critical operations.

6 Steps for Implementing Effective Data Backup and Recovery Services

Step 1: taking initiative for data protection.

Businesses need to be proactive in preventing the negative impacts of technical downtime. The first step is to begin discussing the topic of data protection. Sometimes, top executives may not fully grasp the consequences of neglecting data protection or the costs of implementing a solution.

A crucial aspect is highlighting the potential financial losses that can occur without a robust data protection plan. Educating decision-makers about the benefits of data protection and the risks of not having one is essential to gain their support.

Businesses can create a culture that values preparedness and resilience by taking the initiative to address data protection and involving stakeholders in discussions. Being proactive lays the foundation for developing an effective disaster recovery plan, safeguarding critical data, and ensuring uninterrupted business operations.

Step 2: Building an Effective Data Backup and Recovery Plan

With the support of upper management, it’s time to build an effective data backup and recovery plan. The first crucial step in this process is clearly understanding your data storage requirements. By evaluating your current storage setup and anticipating future needs, you can lay a solid foundation for a robust plan.

To begin, assess your existing data storage environment, leveraging the backing of upper management. Take stock of the types and volumes of data you currently have, including databases, files, emails, and multimedia content. This comprehensive evaluation ensures no critical data is overlooked during the backup and recovery planning.

Consider your allocated budget for data backup and disaster recovery plan alongside this assessment. A clear understanding of your financial resources will guide you in making informed decisions when selecting appropriate storage solutions. It enables you to strike a balance between effectiveness and cost efficiency.

In addition to evaluating the present, protecting your future data storage needs is essential. Anticipate factors such as business expansion plans, potential data sources, and evolving data usage and storage trends. Seeking guidance from managed IT services providers (MSP) can be valuable if you need assistance estimating your future storage requirements. Their expertise and industry knowledge can provide insights contributing to a well-informed decision-making process.

Furthermore, carefully consider your data retention and access requirements. Determine the duration to retain data and identify the stakeholders responsible for defining your data retention policy. Take into account any regulatory guidelines applicable to your industry, as well as any internal policies. Also, understand who requires access to the data and how frequently they need to access it. This understanding is pivotal in accurately estimating your storage needs and designing a plan that aligns with your business objectives.

Need help with how to enhance your data backup and recovery plan? Let LayerOne’s backup and recovery services expertise guide you toward the best solution.

Step 3: Implementing Data Backup

When protecting your data, using a multilayered approach is vital. By having multiple layers of backup, you can ensure that your data is safe and accessible, no matter when or where a disaster occurs—whether you’re working in the office or remotely.

First and foremost, include a cloud-based data backup solution as part of your plan. This solution means storing your data in the cloud, offering extra security and redundancy. Even if a disaster affects your physical location, your data will be safe in a secondary data center in a different area. Cloud backup also protects your data from hardware failures.

In addition to cloud backup with managed cloud services , having a local backup on-site is a good idea. Create a backup of your critical data and keep a copy in a secure secondary location. Creating a backup ensures that your data is protected both off-site and on-site.

To keep your backup plan effective, schedule regular data backups. Automating your backups is smart, so you’re always prepared for potential disasters. Determine a backup schedule that suits your business needs, including daily, weekly, or monthly backups depending on the importance of your data.

If your business operates in an area prone to seasonal disasters, consider adjusting your backup frequency during those high-risk periods. This extra precaution ensures that your data remains secure and accessible when it matters most.

Step 4: Establishing Business Continuity

Your disaster recovery process is essential for restoring data during a disaster. Developing a comprehensive plan that includes critical components such as identifying responsible employees, establishing a communication plan, and outlining data restoration procedures is essential.

This step plays a critical role in creating an effective business continuity plan. We recommend crafting a thorough disaster recovery plan with well-defined processes and clear responsibilities. Within your restoration plan, outline the necessary steps to recover from a potential disaster, assigning specific individuals for each task and identifying the required tools and resources.

Additionally, your communication plan should establish effective channels for reaching out to employees, customers, and stakeholders in case of a disaster. It’s best to include up-to-date contact information for key personnel and stakeholders to ensure seamless communication during challenging times.

Step 5: Regularly Assessing Your Infrastructure and Testing Your Backups

It is crucial to incorporate regular testing and maintenance procedures to maintain the effectiveness of your data backup and recovery plan. Technology evolves rapidly, and your disaster recovery plan must adapt to keep pace with hardware, operating systems, and infrastructure changes. Additionally, the nature of your business may transform due to customer demands or growth, necessitating adjustments within your IT environment.

Building a robust data disaster recovery plan and implementing consistent data backups are essential protective measures for your business. However, they alone are not sufficient. To ensure your ability to respond effectively during a crisis and recover critical data and systems, you must regularly assess your infrastructure, perform tests, and make necessary updates.

Regularly assessing your infrastructure involves evaluating your IT environment’s hardware, operating systems, and other components to identify outdated or vulnerable elements. By proactively recognizing potential issues, you can address them promptly and minimize the risk of data corruption or loss.

Testing your backups is crucial to an effective data backup and recovery plan. By conducting regular tests, you can verify the integrity and completeness of your backup data. Testing helps ensure that your backups are up to date and contain all the necessary files needed for recovery in case of a disaster.

To determine the testing frequency, consider the size of your business and the amount of data you need to review. Some companies opt for annual plan reviews and updates, while others choose more frequent comprehensive testing, including tabletop exercises and disaster simulations. The key is to establish a testing schedule that suits your specific business needs and provides confidence in the reliability of your backup and recovery processes.

Step 6: Remaining Informed and Adapting to Technological Advances

In the final step of building your data recovery plan, it is crucial to emphasize staying informed and adapting to the ever-changing technological landscape. Technology is a rapidly evolving industry, and staying updated on the latest advancements is essential for maintaining an effective data backup and recovery strategy.

One key area to focus on is cybersecurity. Cyberattacks pose a significant threat to businesses, and staying informed about the latest security risks and vulnerabilities is essential. Regularly educating yourself and your team about emerging cyber threats and implementing robust security measures can help safeguard your data from potential breaches.

Compliance regulations also play a crucial role in data protection. Laws such as GDPR and HIPAA continually evolve, and staying informed about updates and changes is essential. Stay current with compliance requirements to ensure your data backup and recovery plan aligns with the latest legal obligations and industry standards.

Additionally, monitoring technological advancements in data storage and recovery solutions is essential. New technologies and services are constantly emerging, offering more efficient and reliable ways to protect and restore your data. Staying informed about these advancements can help you assess if any updates or improvements to your plan are necessary.

Looking for ways to protect your business from cyber threats? Discover LayerOne Networks’ top-notch cybersecurity solutions and safeguard your valuable data.

Partnering with Experts for Enhanced Data Backup and Recovery Services

Partnering with experts in the field is beneficial to enhance your data recovery capabilities. Collaborating with experienced professionals specializing in data recovery can provide valuable insights, expertise, and resources to bolster your data protection efforts.

At LayerOne Networks, we are a trusted name in the industry, offering top-notch IT-managed services tailored to your data recovery needs. With our extensive knowledge and cutting-edge technologies, we can assist you in safeguarding your critical data and ensuring swift recovery in the face of unforeseen events.

By partnering with the best IT consulting firm , you gain access to our skilled professionals, who will work closely with you to develop a customized data recovery strategy. From conducting risk assessments to implementing robust backup solutions, we will guide you every step of the way, ensuring your data remains secure and recoverable.

So, don’t leave your data recovery to chance. Contact LayerOne Networks today and partner with us to strengthen your data recovery plan and protect your business from potential disasters.

• Archiving and tape backup

Data backup is constantly evolving, yet it endures as a necessity for organizations facing a host of potential disruptions. TechTarget's data backup guide discusses the importance of backup, outlines the benefits and challenges of providing this layer of data protection and provides an overview of different backup approaches, technologies and vendors. It also describes how to create and implement a data backup plan and includes a planning template. Throughout the guide, hyperlinks point to related articles that cover those topics in more depth.

Data backup plan template: a free download and guide, download our free backup planning template to help you get started or improve your current plan. it's important to have critical information laid out in a document..

• Paul Kirvan

Even though most IT organizations perform data backups daily, they may not have a formal documented data backup plan, which is a key piece of the puzzle.

The data backup plan defines the overall process for backing up data, databases, systems, applications and other information resources. The data administration team generates daily reports on backup activities, specifying what it backed up, the locations, date and time of the backup, and if it was successful.

The tips here will help you prepare a basic plan. The associated backup plan template will help you complete a plan .

Importance of a data backup plan

The backup plan provides a repository for relevant information about the overall backup process. Items your organization can add to a backup plan include the corporate policy for backing up data, lists of backup team members, lists of vendors and their contact data, general procedures for backing up data, and metrics for measuring overall data backup performance.

Having a data backup plan is also important from an audit perspective. IT auditors generally look for evidence of controls that manage specific IT functions. You can use a data backup plan to define such controls. While the plan is not necessarily used as a daily document, it can serve as a framework for performing the all-important data backup function.

This article is part of

What is data backup? An in-depth guide

• Which also includes:
• The importance of data backup policies and what to include
• Backup scheduling best practices to ensure availability
• How to back up your data and keep your files safe

The backup plan template

At its most basic level, a data backup plan specifies the overall backup process, what gets backed up, what technologies and storage resources are used, what steps are taken if data is not successfully backed up, plus other items like testing backup procedures , and reviewing and updating the plan.

The associated backup plan template includes the following components. Use them to update an existing plan or create your own plan using the various elements in the template.

• Revision management . Have a page that lists your revision activities.
• Purpose and scope . Provide details on the plan, as well as assumptions, team descriptions and other background information.
• Backup policy . Specify the company policy regarding data backups .
• Performing data backups . This section defines the backup activities to perform and serves as a starting point for developing daily, weekly and monthly backup schedules.
• Data recovery . Notes that a data recovery process is also needed to complement the data backup plan; this can be a stand-alone data recovery plan or it can be part of the overall backup plan.
• Plan review and maintenance . Describe the process for reviewing and maintaining the plan; it can also specify the need for performing tests of the data backup plan.
• Appendices . Detailed appendices are at the end of the backup plan template; these include lists and contact details on all teams, vendors, backup locations, lists of resources to be backed up and other relevant information. It is important to keep this information up to date.

Data backup plan development guidance

As you go through the backup planning process, there are a number of important steps to follow.

• The plan development team should meet with the internal technology team, application team and data administrators, and establish the scope of the plan.
• Brief IT leadership on these meetings so they are properly informed.
• Gather all relevant data backup documents, such as backup schedules, lists of items to be backed up and tape rotation schedules.
• Identify what management feels are the most important data backup issues to the company; for example, speed of backup, adherence to recovery point objective metrics , and out-of-date copies of databases and other resources.
• Review previous history of data backup problems and how the firm handled them.
• Identify what management feels are the most critical IT assets to be backed up and their frequency.
• Determine the maximum time that management can accept if the backed-up data or systems cannot be quickly recovered.
• Identify the data backup, archiving and related procedures currently used.
• Determine when these procedures were last tested to validate their appropriateness.
• Identify vendors' emergency backup support capabilities, if they have ever been used, if they work properly, how much the company is paying for these services, status of service contract, and presence of service-level agreement and if it is used.
• Compile results from all previous data backup assessments into a gap analysis report that identifies what is currently done versus what ought to be done, with recommendations for achieving the required level of backup capabilities.
• Have management review the report and agree on recommended actions.
• Prepare the plans to address data backup, archiving and other data protection activities.
• Conduct tests of backup procedures to validate their operation and that they satisfy any specific backup performance metrics.
• Schedule the next review and audit of the data backup plan.

Important caveats

Be sure to obtain senior management support so that you can achieve your plan goals. Take the data backup planning process seriously, as it is an essential business activity. Once the data backup plan is complete, review it with business units to make sure it addresses their backup requirements.

Finally, be flexible. You can modify the backup plan template in this article as needed to accomplish your goals.

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When you own a business, you rely on critical information to help you keep track of your operations. Your profits are important to your success, but your data is equally essential because, if the server goes down, you might not be able to provide your clients with products or services. Having the ability to serve customers, vendors, employees and others is why business owners must ensure they have backup and disaster-recovery options ready for their business.  

Most people know that backing up your data is one of the essential tasks to ensuring business continuity. How can you protect your essential data from nature, accidents, hackers, viruses and other threats? This article will present five steps to keep your data safe.  

So, what is business data backup? Well, businesses always have computers with business-critical data. Data backup is the practice of saving enough information that you can recover from a data loss within a reasonable period and for a reasonable amount of money. It’s about having the information that will allow you, at least to a reasonable extent, to continue operating. Perfect recovery in zero time is not the goal; instead, the goal is to think through and test a plan that will allow you to recover operations in a feasible amount of time, and at an affordable cost, for all reasonable data losses.  

Considering Business Disasters  

What are the leading causes of business disasters? Consider the following list:  

• Natural disasters, such as fire, flood, hurricanes or tornadoes.  
• civil disruptions, such as vandalism, wars or riots  
• ordinary crime, such as theft or arson  
• cybercrime, such as ransomware, viruses and hijacked systems  
• Software errors, such as a bug-filled release   
• Hardware failure due to age or a bad environment  
• Human error, such as inadvertently deleting files or discarding computers that have critical data  

You should think about when — not if — you should run through scenarios and plan for what to do in the event of the disaster. And you should do this before disaster occurs. Most companies not involved with loading hardware and software on a day-to-day basis will find it essential to have an outside expert, such as their IT person, develop this plan.  

Evaluation  

Step 1: Evaluate your data: Evaluate the company’s data as a whole. Most backup methods have a cost per byte; therefore, the more data you back up, the more costly the solution will be. But most company data can be grouped in the following four ways:  

• Critical data without which you would fail. For this category, think about the least data you would have to reconstruct your business after a total loss. (For example, all your onsite computers and data-storage devices are stolen.) Some very small businesses could recover OK if the backup stored just the QuickBooks data somewhere else. Most companies have other records, such as employee files, contracts and other things, stored as data. All of these might be essential.  
• Important data that would cause inefficiency, but not failure, if the data were not recovered from the backup. An example would be scanned copies of documents for which hard-copy paper backups exist.  
• Nice-to-have data, such as records that do not have to be retained. Certain documents of a sufficient age do not have to be kept, per government requirements, so it is not critical to recover them.  
• Unimportant data, such as files that are irrelevant to the business. Examples would be computer games and files that employees use during break times.  

Many companies back up everything because separating it out can be time-consuming. But you can reduce costs if you can identify the data you can live without. Once you choose a backup method, you can cost it out for all company data. If that cost is not affordable, cut back the tiers of data, working in reverse order, until you at least have the critical data stored and retrievable in a reasonable amount of time.  

Related: Cybersecurity Basics for Business in 2021

Establishing Objectives  

Step 2: Define Your Key Recovery Objectives: Among the components of a data-recovery plan are two key parameters that define how long your business can afford to be offline and how much data loss it can tolerate. These are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). We’ll explore each in turn.  

• The RTO is your organization’s goal for the maximum time it should take to restore normal operations following an outage or a data loss. The RTO goal must be considered carefully and used to evaluate the backup and restoration methods.  
• The RPO is your goal for the maximum amount of data that the organization can tolerate losing. This parameter is measured in time — from when a failure occurs to your last valid data backup. For example, if you experience a failure now and your last full data backup was 24 hours ago, the RPO is 24 hours. In many cases, small companies can survive the loss of “today’s data” as long as they restore to the previous end of the day. The data restore is often augmented by manually reentering lost transactions from the partial day.  
• Let’s turn to immutability strategies . Immutability means that nothing can change the backup dataset once it is made. The problem with ransomware is that it changes all files on locally attached devices. You often don’t know when this is happening, and, if a backup is only locally attached, it is vulnerable to ransomware. Therefore, immutability is critical. You don’t have immutability if you just have backup datasets attached to the computer network. If copies are stored offsite in the cloud or elsewhere, then you have an immutable strategy. But it’s important to bear in mind the impact on RTO if you have to retrieve them.  
• How will you source any computer systems that might be missing or damaged? Sometimes, it can be difficult to obtain replacement computers, especially when supply-chain issues are common. The problem of sourcing replacements for damaged computers can be mitigated by having a duplicate computer already on hand or available to rent, or by using virtual machines on a different, more powerful computer. Additionally, many backup systems can run a restored complete computer image from a virtual machine set up in the cloud or a local appliance computer.  

Methodological Choices  

Step 3: Choose a Backup Methodology: Keeping in mind the data you want to back up, the RTO and RPO parameters, and immutability, the next step is to select a backup methodology that will fit your needs. Several outside experts recommend a 3-2-1 strategy, as well. This involves keeping (at least) three copies of the dataset on two different types of media, and one offsite.  

What follows are some potential methodologies you could choose:  

• Backups of just your essential data. This would mean making a copy of your critical data on a device or in the cloud. It could be on a USB drive, a network drive or the cloud; however, at least one of these copies must be disconnected from the network. (If it is locally stored, put it in a fire safe.) Your RTO and RPO must allow for the reinstallation of the computer OS and software.  
• Total and differential backups. A total backup is a complete copy of the data, including metadata such as the system registry, on a computer system. You can restore a total backup to a new computer of the same type with no software loaded. Restoring a differential backup dataset typically means restoring the total backup and all the differential backups in order. This technique reduces the RPO because you can take differential backups many times per day, but it comes at the expense of the RTO.  
• Local backups (not recommended): If ransomware can get at the data, consider it to be local. So, OneDrive files are local from an immutability point of view. Commercial systems can redundantly store the backup sets in the cloud on two separate data centers. Some of them can scan for ransomware and viruses before committing the data, so you know everything that makes it to the cloud is OK.  

Test in Advance  

Step 4: Test the Restore Methodology: First, pick a scenario for which you wish to test. Selecting a more problematic scenario will assure you that you can recover from easier scenarios.  

• Restore the environment  
• Restore the software  
• Restore the data  
• Operate the critical programs to see if they work.  

In most cases, I prefer to pick a “bare metal restore” (BMR) scenario. BMR simply means that the device I am restoring to has no software loaded on it, or the drive can be formatted and reloaded. If you do a BMR, the backup software is responsible for the first three steps (including all the activation, configuration and metadata). Then, operate the critical programs (e.g., Quickbooks, Microsoft Office, quoting tools) to see if they work and have the correct data as of the date backed up.  

Step 5: Review the Preceding Steps to See if you can Make Improvements: Once the backup and restore cycle has been tested and performed, you will have an actual value for the RTO and RPO. You will also have a cost. You can and should tweak parts of the plan to improve the value-to-cost ratio. This is an iterative process because technology changes and improves.  

Don’t Lose Profits…or Customers  

Business owners should back up their data on a set schedule. This will help ensure they don’t lose profits — and customers — if a disaster occurs. They should carefully consider what data they need to back up and make 3-2-1 copies. At least one copy must be immutable. Businesses should also test these backups periodically to ensure that the backups work. Finally, they should regularly review the plan; after all, prices, technology, threats and companies change.  

You owe a duty of care to your employees, vendors, ownership and customers to protect your data as well as you can afford to. Data loss is a catastrophic event if it can’t be remedied, and it potentially can be very costly even if it can be.  

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A step-by-step guide to backup strategy for small business

By N‑able

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I’ve been in IT for over 25 years and spend much of my time rubbing elbows with IT pros that specialize in certain parts of the industry. So, when I talk a lot (and I do) about backups, there’s sort of an assumption that the IT pro I’m interacting with has the basics down.

But, as those of you in SMBs know, it’s never that easy. You have so many hats (including backup) to wear, that you often need a little push in the right direction so that you don’t need to try and reinvent the wheel as it were.

So, what’s the right way to plan out your backup strategy for small business?

I’ve written (and will reference here) a bunch of articles over the past two years about the various hows and whys of backups. But, rather than make you search for each of them, I wanted to consolidate them (alongside some articles on this blog written by other contributors) into a single, practical plan for small business disaster recovery and backup.

I’m going to walk through the steps by posing them as questions that you may (or may not) have considered. That way, if you are well past a given step in your thinking and/or execution, you can jump ahead to the next one.

Why do you even need a backup?

For those of you thinking the question is ludicrous, you can skip down a few lines. But there are some businesses today that are materially larger than a SoHo that still don’t have a backup in place. You need one for a number of reasons.

• You’re not making money if a critical part of your environment is down.
• The expectation by customers today of companies large  and  small is that you’re  always available .
• Without a backup, it will take you materially longer to not just rebuild whatever data set/application/system was impacted, but to also put your operations back into a “close to current” state as they were just prior to the “disaster” experienced.

Other articles to read:

Are your clients ready for a major weather event?

“Where did my server go?”: How to defend against ransomware

Why can’t I just use a sync tool?

I have a backup of critical files going to a cloud sync provider. But, that’s a single laptop. Sure, you can sync up the important files and folders on your one file server to Google Drive/OneDrive/DropBox/etc., but that sync won’t address the problem of you potentially losing the entire server. Sync tools are great for simple backups of file sets, but they are not a replacement for a true backup that allows your business to recover (and not just some files).

Check out the following article for more on this:

Sync and share solutions; no substitute for Backup

What kind of backup should I be using?

You’ve got a wide range of options here, as every vendor shouts at the top of their lungs that  their  way of doing backups is the best.  First off, you need to decide does your business require an  ability to restore, an ability to recover  or an  ability to maintain availability  of services? Since I have no idea what your specific needs are, you’ll need to do some soul-searching to determine just how “up and running” your business needs to be.

Then there’s the issue of where you should store your backups. You can keep them on-premises, in the cloud or use a  hybrid mix of both . There are pros and cons for each, but the basic thinking is if you use only one (either on-prem or in the cloud) to store your backups, you’re missing out on the ability to recover from a loss of location or loss of Internet connectivity. By having hybrid-cloud backups, you retain sync’d backups in both locations, increasing your ability to recover from just about any disaster.

What needs to be backed up?

In a word?   Everything . The whole point of disaster recovery for a small business is to provide an ability to recover regardless of the loss incurred. One of the simplest ways to accomplish this is to perform image-level backups, where the entire system (whether physical or virtual) is backed up as a single data set (more on this later).

Given, you may be reading this because you don’t have your backups in proper order, you should at very least be considering the backup of critical servers and services that you know your business can’t be without for very long.

Which backup method will you use?

Backups can be created using two basic methods – file-level and image-level.  File level  is perfect for backing up files and folders on your file server. It also can serve as the means to backup a database for a given application. Application-aware backups (those that are already aware of what needs to be backed up for a given application) can simplify file-level backups by intelligently capturing all the relevant data sets needed to recover an application.

Image-level backups are perfect for when you want to protect an entire system at once. They also give you access to fast recoveries both locally and remotely using a  continuous recovery model  (where a restore of each backup is performed as the backup is created).

( Here’s a great recovery map  we built a while back that helps you decide.)

What are you protecting against?

One of the challenges (from a technical execution perspective) in defining what needs to be backed up and which method to use is the fact that you can’t really do it without first knowing what the disaster looks like that you’re preparing for.  It’s like packing your clothes into a suitcase without first knowing where you’re going on vacation. It’s important to first  define the “disasters”  you’ll be protecting your business against so that you can determine what needs to be backed up.  For example, if you’re only worried about files being deleted, performing image-based backups makes no sense. Likewise, if you’re wanting to protect against a complete loss of location, having file-level backups of every server will equate to a MUCH longer recovery period than you’d like.

What kind of recovery objectives should you set?

For each data set, application or system you wish to recover, you need to establish some parameters around what the recovery of said recovery set needs to look like. There are a few industry staples to assist. The first is your  recovery time objective  (RTO), which is the amount of time you will take to recover. Next is your  recovery point objective  (RPO), which represents the target amount of data lost. Last is the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPoD), which represents, should you miss your RTO. In other words how long can you go before the business REALLY begins to suffer.

You need to establish these values for each backup set you wish to recover, beginning with the most critical and working your way down. The reason is that once you determine that your website needs a recovery time of, say, 10 minutes, and a recovery point of only 15 minutes, you may shift your current file-level backups to an image-level continuous recovery scenario. See how this all comes together?

Some other reading on this subject:

What’s your RTO/RPO and how do you calculate it?

3 Tips for Shrinking your RTOs and RPOs

How do you build a small business disaster recovery plan?

The plan itself should start with outlining the various data sets and the disasters you want to protect against. Then dive into each intersection of the two. The detail here should entail first, what data set is being backed up and then the plan to recover. I’ve done these where I literally spelled it out click by click, but you may not have time for that. At a minimum, I’d suggest spelling out the recovery type, the data set to be recovered, dependencies to be aware of (e.g. Active Directory) and any post-restore steps that need to be taken.

Check out these article for even more DR insight:

Choosing the right disaster recovery solution, part 1: Defining the disasters

Choosing the right disaster recovery solution, part 2: Finding your feature set

Preventing 3 common Disaster Recovery scenarios

5 Questions to ask yourself when planning a disaster recovery scenario

You’re going to test this, right?

At this point, you’re likely a bit overwhelmed already, given all the choices and the work I’m assigning to you to do just to get backups right. And now I want you to  test it ???

In fact, this is both the hardest part (because who has the time and resources to mock up a disaster and then test recovery?) as well as the most critical (because without testing, your plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on). Testing, at a minimum, can be a tabletop session with those involved with the recovery process where you walk through the steps together discussing what may go wrong and what to do about it. At a maximum, you’d perform an actual recovery to an alternate server, location, etc. testing out the backups you have, ensuring an ability to recover.

Can you do this yourself?

It’s worth mentioning that all of this may be well beyond your technical abilities and/or the time you have available to devote to backup strategy, planning and testing. There are tons of IT service providers that offer backups as part of a more comprehensive list of services, and they may be better suited to address these needs.

Stepping your way to backups

The intent of this short guide is to give you some sense of direction for the steps you can take to establish backups in a way that ensures your business remains productive, no matter the disaster. Elevating your thinking around the backup  why ,  what  and  how  will put your small business in a much better place to proactively take measures to address any kind of loss of data, application or system.

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15 Best Practices for Small Business Backup

• December 20, 2023

Data protection and recovery is just one of the many things you have to juggle as a business leader. To keep things simple, you might deploy a small business backup solution and call it a day. It’s important to recognize that doing so might leave you vulnerable to costly data loss  and a difficult recovery from ransomware, cyberattacks, accidental file deletion, and other threats.

Small businesses need to consider when, where, and how often they’ll back up their data. They also have to decide what recovery methods to use and how long they want to retain their old backups.

There’s no cookie-cutter plan for data backups because you have to tailor your approach to the unique needs of your business. However, there are some general guidelines to follow. These best practices for small business backups will help ensure your data is adequately protected and quickly recoverable if a disaster strikes.

1) Start with a backup strategy

Data protection begins with creating a detailed plan that outlines your company’s specific objectives. Many organizations include this information in their business continuity plan (BCP) or disaster recovery plan (DRP).

History has shown that businesses without a disaster recovery plan in place are far more likely to struggle or close after a disaster. Despite this, a 2021 study revealed that only half of organizations have DRPs in place.

Before you can tackle issues like backup frequency and infrastructure needs, you’ll first need to evaluate these factors:

• Your risk level for different data-loss events, such as ransomware
• How those events would affect various aspects of your operations, including productivity and revenue
• Your recovery point and recovery time objectives, which indicate how quickly you need to restore data to prevent lasting harm to your company

You’re the only one who knows the ins and outs of your business well enough to develop an appropriate backup strategy. However, no matter how your organization operates, creating a detailed plan prior to deployment helps ensure you have all the pieces in place.

2) Aim for business continuity

Be wary when you select a small business backup solution. Some lightweight options merely replicate your data to an external drive or a cloud folder. Likewise, cloud-based file-sharing applications like Google Backup and Sync aren’t designed to serve as your data backup solution. Instead, stick to solutions that provide business continuity and keep your business running after a disaster.

A mere backup of your files is useless if ransomware infects all your applications and operating systems. Not only that, but if it takes days to restore data from a backup, your business could suffer irreparable damage. Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) solutions, on the other hand, are designed to provide more robust recovery options so that critical operations can continue with minimal interruption.

3) Back up data frequently

When you perform regular backups, you lose less data in between recovery points. In other words, the more often you back up data, the better.

In the old days, overnight and weekend backups were the norm. Modern solutions have significantly stepped up the game by backing up data as often as every five minutes.

That doesn’t mean you should constantly back up everything, but it’s a good idea for certain situations. If your business uses different kinds of servers, some will require a higher priority than others, such as:

• Exchange servers: hourly backups
• Terminal servers: daily backups
• Auxiliary domain controllers: several backups per week

Specific industries, such as healthcare and finance, back up data more frequently to comply with regulatory requirements. If your business constantly produces or modifies large amounts of data, then you probably don’t want your backups to be more than a few minutes old.

4) Use remote storage

On-site backups are still the go-to for speed, but relying on them exclusively is dangerous. A fire or flood could wipe out your on-premises infrastructure, leaving you helpless if you don’t have another backup off-site.

Businesses should keep copies of their backups at a secondary location, such as:

• Private clouds or data centers
• Public cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services
• Secondary business locations

With that said, remote storage shouldn’t replace your on-site backups. Today’s best small business backup solutions offer hybrid backup protection, which stores data both on-site and in the cloud.

5) Retain backups for the long term

Not every backup is significant enough to keep forever – and it would be impractical and expensive to try. However, it’s wise to retain certain backups for extended periods. For instance, banks and healthcare organizations must comply with strict data retention policies that require them to keep backups for several years.

A good BC/DR solution lets you customize your retention options to keep multiple copies of recent backups and compressed versions of older ones. Here’s an example of how long you might retain different backup types:

• Local backups for three months
• Intra-daily backups for seven days
• Daily backups for two weeks
• Weekly backups for one month
• Monthly backups until local backups are deleted

As a rule of thumb, retain backups for as long as you reasonably can. Some data backup providers have made this easier by offering infinite cloud retention, allowing you to store unlimited backups in the cloud with no time restriction.

6) Backups shouldn’t allow inbound Internet access

Backup devices that are improperly connected to the Internet are far more susceptible to cyberattacks, including ransomware and malware infections that can render them useless. A backup device has to transmit data to the cloud, but it shouldn’t allow any inbound communication. For the best security, deploy the device in a secure LAN environment and limit even the outbound communications to those that are absolutely necessary. All other communications should be denied.

7) Separate backups from the network

It’s also vital to maintain distance between your backups and your computers and networks.

The FBI explains that some ransomware can “lock cloud-based backups when systems continuously back up in real time.” In a widespread ransomware attack, your backups are usually the only way to safely get your data back. Without them, you’re under pressure to pay the ransom , which law enforcement strongly discourages. To keep that from happening, it’s of the utmost importance that you protect your backups from malware infections.

8) Encrypt backups

If hackers manage to get their hands on your data, encryption could be the one thing that stops them from reading and distributing it. This is especially important for sectors like healthcare, where HIPAA guidelines require added security measures to protect sensitive patient data.

When possible, encrypt backups in transit and at rest. This means the data is encrypted as it’s uploaded to the cloud and when it’s stored on the backup device or data center. Using AES 256 and SSL key-based encryption offers the strongest level of protection because they’re usually unbreakable.

9) Protect your end points

In an ideal small business backup deployment, users save data on a server that’s routinely backed up. In the real world, that’s not always how it works. In too many cases, large volumes of data reside on users’ local computers rather than on network drives. If something happens to that local data, it could be gone for good.

That’s why it’s sound practice to protect each end point or computer where critical data may live.

BC/DR providers have addressed this issue by offering solutions with endpoint recovery. Businesses can opt to deploy an onsite backup device to protect the machines that matter most, while also using cloud services to back up individual PCs.

10) Back up SaaS data

A 2021 study found that 45% of small and medium-sized businesses have all or most of their business software based in the cloud. Unfortunately, many of those businesses don’t independently back up their software-as-a-service (SaaS) data.

Using SaaS applications creates a false sense of security. People assume that their data is safe because it’s in the cloud. However, SaaS data is vulnerable to a lot of the same threats as local data. IBM’s 2023 “Cost of a Data Breach Report” found that more than 80% of data breaches involved data stored in the cloud. Even worse, this data isn’t included with your regular backup processes, so a disaster could permanently wipe it out.

Using an independent SaaS backup solution is essential for protecting this crucial data. These tools store data from applications like M365  and QuickBooks Online to separate clouds. You can still recover the data, even if it’s deleted or encrypted in the original SaaS application.

11) Move away from backup chain dependency

Traditional incremental backups are notorious for data corruption because of the way errors occur in the backup chain. Each incremental is dependent on the chain, so if there’s an issue at any one point, the whole backup might be unrecoverable during the rebuild.

BC/DR providers have developed new backup processes that reduce these risks. Each new recovery point is stored in a fully constructed state, which can be booted as a virtual machine. Unlike traditional incrementals, there is no rebuild process. This doesn’t have to mean that each backup is massive. The best solutions are extremely efficient with high backup frequencies.

12) Test backups regularly

Don’t assume you can restore your data just because you have a backup. Regularly testing on-site and off-site backups is the only way to know if they’ll work if and when you need them.

Ideally, your small business backup system will have an automated process that validates each new backup without your prompting and alerts you if there are any issues. For example, some solutions automatically test-boot each backup using technology such as screen recognition. You can also customize the verification process with specific scripts to ensure that you can boot protected machines in the state that you need.

13) Integrate with caution

Several leading BC/DR systems allow — or in some cases require — you to integrate a patchwork of different backup components to achieve the continuity objectives you want.

For example, the core BC/DR platform might be software. You have to bring your own device for local backup storage, additional hardware to enable virtualization, and private or public cloud service to maintain off-site backups.

Integrating those disparate components is a workable option for some organizations, but it requires extensive knowledge and care. A single deployment or management error could create problems in the backup or recovery process. It’s imperative to weave the overall BC/DR infrastructure as tightly as possible, and cobbling together components might not be the best way to do it.

For a more unified approach and greater peace of mind, consider an all-in-one system . These solutions fully integrate the backup software, hardware, and cloud into a single package. They store backups locally on provider-issued devices and replicate them to dedicated cloud services. This makes the deployment completely seamless, easier to manage, and less expensive, with much less opportunity for error.

14) Restore data according to the disaster

A good backup solution will offer numerous ways to restore data based on the wide range of crisis situations you might encounter.

Imagine that a single critical folder goes missing from your system. You need to recover that data, but performing a full backup restore is a waste of time and energy. For individual files and folders, a file-level recovery option is the fastest option.

By the same token, recovering a few files isn’t going to cut it when you’ve experienced extensive data loss. You’ll get better results by rolling back to the most recent recovery point or using more precise restore options that only restore the files that have changed since the last backup.

In worst-case scenarios, a protected machine might become completely un-bootable. Those types of failures often require a bare metal restore.

Regardless of the degree or severity of the event, choosing the appropriate recovery method is central to keeping costs low, limiting the effects of a disruption, and getting lost data back as quickly and efficiently as possible.

15) Use backup virtualization while the recovery is underway

Time is of the essence when you lose data, and you don’t have to sit by and wait for your recovery process to finish. Leading BC/DR systems can virtualize a backup in a matter of seconds. This gives you near instant access to your protected machines, including their data, applications, and operating systems.

In catastrophic disasters, it’s not unusual for data recovery to take hours, days, or weeks. Backup virtualization allows your teams to continue using the critical systems that keep your business running. It provides continuity through the disruption, so your essential operations don’t stay down for too long.

Expert advice for small business backups

Small business backup is the foundation of your disaster recovery, but simply deploying a solution isn’t enough. To protect your data and ensure you can restore it, you need a sound backup strategy. Whether a single spreadsheet has gone missing or ransomware has locked up a global network of servers, a robust data backup system can help you recover quickly and maintain operational continuity.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly what your deployment should look like. The team at Invenio IT can provide insights into a variety of small business backup solutions and offer general advice about data protection. Reach out to a data protection specialist to learn more.

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• Backup Tips

[Comrehensive Guide] – 4 Steps of Creating the Backup Plan

With the frequency of data breaches and outages increasing, having a solid data backup strategy is more important than ever. What should be included in the backup plan? How to make the backup plan? How to back up data? This post from MiniTool provides details.

Why Is Data Backup Important

Backups protect data from a variety of risks, including hardware failure, human error, cyber attacks, data corruption, and natural disasters. It’s important to protect data from any potential issues so that organizations aren’t caught off guard when something happens. The data backup will enable you to go back in time to the last known good point in time before the problem occurred.

Also see:  Best Practice: 3-2-1 Backup Strategy for Home Users & Businesses

How to Create the Backup Plan

Now, we will introduce how to create the backup plan. Follow the steps below.

Step 1: Assess Your Backup Needs

Step 1 for the data backup plan is to assess your backup needs.

You need to understand the structure and type of data you are dealing with and determine what should be included in the backup plan.

To reduce the risk of data loss, you need to back up your files and databases and you also need to back up your operating system, applications, configuration. If you use virtualization, you need to back up your hosts and management consoles and your virtual machines (VMs). If you use cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), you need to include it in your scope.

When classifying your customer’s dataset, you may also need to consider the following data categories:

• System data: This includes operating system data, which, as it turns out, does not change frequently during the backup lifecycle.
• Application configuration data: This refers to the software configuration files that make up the building blocks of the application. Therefore, application configuration data should take precedence over the application itself.
• Operational data: These are files that are constantly changing, such as user documents, mailboxes, and databases. Since they are both critical to your customer’s business operations, you should keep them separate from other backups while maintaining high availability.

You can also categorize data based on its urgency for recovery.

• Hot data: Refers to critical business documents frequently accessed by your customers. Therefore, your data backup plan should update them regularly while ensuring high availability.
• Cold data: Unlike hot data, cold data is rarely accessed because it is not that important. You can regard it as secondary data that you can back up to a separate, less available location.
• Archived data: Although archived data is rarely accessed, it is often retained for long periods for audit or compliance purposes. Therefore, you can compress and then create backups that remain unchanged for many years.
• Hot Backup vs Cold Backup Differences & Best Hot Backup Practice
• What’s Data Archiving & What’s Difference Between It and Backup

Step 2: Understand the Types of Vulnerabilities

Step 2 for the backup planning is to understand the types of vulnerabilities. 

After defining the dataset, you should conduct a full security audit and you need to understand the types of vulnerabilities your system is facing. The following are the types:

Malware risk: Hackers are increasingly creating sophisticated malware that can penetrate moderately secure networks. Such attacks are carried out through ransomware , Trojan horses, and various economically motivated worms.

Hardware failure : This type of failure is very common, even in the most advanced IT infrastructure. They range from system crashes and power outages to power failures, communication failures, and hard drive crashes.

Natural disasters: While natural disasters are not as common as malware, they are extremely harmful. Events such as hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires have the potential to destroy data storage devices.

End-User errors: Hackers especially like to exploit end-user errors to infiltrate networks and gain access to sensitive data. Because of it, you may want to strictly control data access in the backup plan.

Step 3: Choose the Backup Solution/Destination/Scheme

Step 3 for creating the backup plan is to choose the backup solution, device, and scheme.

1. Backup Solution

The data backup market is large and growing. Therefore, there are a variety of backup storage solutions. The three main options are – hardware appliances, software solutions, and cloud services.

Hardware Equipment

These devices usually include storage, which is a device that you can install and connect to your network. These devices are easy to install and configure. In most cases, you do not need to configure a separate server, operating system, or install any software. An agent installed on your system performs the backup, and you can access the solution through the graphical interface provided by the appliance.

However, keep in mind that if your hardware device fails, you will lose your entire data backup solution. Even if you back up to a secondary location, you will need to reconfigure your backup solution before restoring, which increases your restore time.

Software Solution

The software solution installs on your own system and handles the backup process. Many solutions allow you to use existing systems, but some require dedicated servers configured specifically for backup. For these, you need to install and configure the operating system and backup software. In many cases, you can install software on a virtual machine (VM).

Software solutions offer greater flexibility than hardware appliances, especially if your infrastructure changes frequently. Also, software solutions can be cheaper than buying a hardware appliance package, and they also allow you to choose and configure your own storage.

Cloud Service

Many vendors offer Backup as a Service (BaaS)—a cloud-based offering that allows you to configure and run backups from a vendor or service provider’s cloud infrastructure by installing a lightweight agent on your machine. BaaS is even simpler than software because there is no need to configure the operating system.

Of course, if your organization handles sensitive data or is subject to regulatory requirements, you will need to check whether cloud backup using a BaaS solution is acceptable.

List of 2019 best 10 free cloud storage services to back up your photos, videos, music, files. Select the preferred free cloud storage to upload files, photos.

2. Backup Devices

You should also choose the backup devices for the backup plan. There are four main devices – local or USB disks, NAS, tape, and cloud storage. To get more information, you can refer to this post – Computer Backup Devices & How to Back up Data to Them .

3. Backup Schemes

There are many types of backups, and you should choose according to your backup plan. Here are three main backup schemes:

Full backup – copies the entire system.

Incremental backup – copies all files that have changed since the last backup.

Differential backup – copies all files that have changed since the last full backup.

Related articles:

• 3 Types of Backup: Full, Incremental, Differential
• Full vs Incremental vs Differential Backup: Which Is Better?

Step 4: Test the Recovery

Step 4 for creating the backup plan is to test the recovery.

Before you fully deploy a backup, you had better use it for testing. Your data backup plan should include a comprehensive testing program to confirm that everything is running smoothly. And, most importantly, you should run data recovery tests to evaluate your recovery speed and disaster recovery capabilities.

You should remember to test all types of backups and confirm that they are recoverable. Since different types of backups have different structures, they present various data recovery challenges.

Hence, you need to pay attention to RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RTO specifies the time required to recover all system resources after a disaster. RPO helps you establish optimal data backup frequency by calculating and defining the maximum tolerable data loss.

What’s the recovery point objective (RPO) & recovery time objective (RTO)? RTO vs RPO, what are the differences. What disaster recovery solutions cover RTO/RPO?

How to Back up and Restore Data

After introducing how to create the backup plan, we will introduce how to back up data regularly and how to recover it. There is a piece of software called MiniTool ShadowMaker , which supports Windows 7/8/10/11.

You can back up the operating system, important files/folders, selected partitions, and even the whole disk to HDD, SSD, USB external disks, Hardware RAID, Network Attached Storage (NAS), Home File Server, and so on. Besides, it supports three backup types we mentioned in the last part – full, differential, and incremental backups.

Now, let’s see how to back up and restore data with MiniTool ShadowMaker.

Step 1: Download and install MiniTool ShadowMaker on your Windows computer.

MiniTool ShadowMaker Trial Click to Download 100% Clean & Safe

Step 2: Choose  Keep Trial . After entering its main interface, go to the  Backup  page.

Step 3: Then click the  Source  module to choose the backup source. It selects the system partition and system reserved partition by default. As for data backup, you can choose  Folders and Files  to continue and choose the files you want to back up.

Step 4: Returning to the  Backup  page, click the  Destination  module to select the destination path to save the backup image. It is recommended to choose an external hard drive.

Step 5: After having successfully selected the backup source and destination, you can click  Back up Now  to perform the data backup action immediately.

If you want to perform the differential or incremental backup, you can go to the Backup interface and choose Scheme to set it.

Then, let’s see how to restore data with MiniTool ShadowMaker.

Step 1: After entering the main interface, please go to the  Manage  page.

Step 2: Then you will find the backups are listed here. If not, you can click the  Add Backup  button to add it.

Step 3: Click the  Menu  button on the right side, and then you will get the context menu.

Step 4: In the context menu,  click Browse  or  Restore . Next, you are required to select the backup version. Then click  Next .

Step 5: In the pop-up window, you can expand the folder and choose the individual file to restore. Then click  Next .

Step 6: Next, choose a location to save the restored file. Then click  Next . The selective file restore process will begin. When the process is finished, you can click  OK  and  Finish .

In addition to MiniTool ShadoaMaker, the MiniTool team also has another recovery software –  MiniTool Power Data Recovery .

You can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to easily recover permanently deleted documents, videos, photos, audios, etc. from Windows PC or laptop, SD/memory card, USB flash/pen drive, external hard drive, solid-state drive, etc. If you have lost some data you need, you can use this program to easily restore them.

Bottom Line

This post introduces how to create the backup plan and how to perform the data backup. If you have any different opinions of the backup plan and MiniTool software, you can leave a message in the comment zone or contact us via  [email protected]  and we will reply to you as soon as possible.

About The Author

Position: Columnist

• Cloud Backup

Does Your Business Have a Backup Plan?

Cloudwards.net may earn a small commission from some purchases made through our site. However, any earnings do not affect how we review services. Learn more about our editorial integrity and research process .

Last Updated: 26 Feb'24 2024-02-26T10:02:13+00:00

All our content is written fully by humans; we do not publish AI writing. Learn more here.

Things can and probably will go wrong at some point, even if you do our best to prevent a disaster. This philosophy also holds for our computer software and hardware, although in this case, we must prepare for accidents and other malfunctions that might cause us to lose data.

Does your business have a backup plan for when the unexpected happens?

Natural disasters don’t pick and choose their victims, they just happen. Earthquakes, floods and landslides are all capable of separating you from your important business data. Thieves, intruders and malicious hackers aren’t as blind as nature, but they won’t hesitate to do damage to your business for their own benefit. Your employees might also accidentally delete files, which benefits no one.

Because your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it’s difficult to completely prevent all of this. When prevention fails, it’s best to have a good backup plan to deal with the new issues.

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What Is a Backup Plan?

Simply, a backup plan is a strategy that defines how you’re going to backup your data. It might involve storing data on your computer, but also on an external device and a remote location, such as the cloud. That’s the 3-2-1 backup rule , anyway. 

You can also create another more specific backup plan that only deals with backing up your data to the cloud. If you do that, you can easily implement the 3-2-1 backup rule by using services that provide hybrid backup. 

Hybrid backup enables you to backup data to both an external device and the cloud at the same time. If you want to know more about it, read our hybrid backup for SMBs guide and consult our best hybrid backup for business roundup for services that offer it.

Types of Backup

The cloud wasn’t always the way businesses backed up their data. Decades ago — ancient history, in IT terms — businesses used magnetic tapes, floppy discs and CDs to backup their data. It was a decent solution for a while, but not the most effective one because these devices were kept in the same physical location, which made it easy for disasters to damage them.

When companies needed to expand their storage capacity to meet their increased demand for data, so they turned to hard disk drives. Some of these drives were shipped and stored in a different location to prevent loss due to the aforementioned natural disasters and other accidents.

However, this was an inconvenient process, to say the least, because companies needed to physically ship large hard drives to a different location. Plus, it wasn’t cheap, either.

Technology continuously advances, so the need for such archaic methods has largely phased out. Today, you can backup your data to a remote data center from the comfort of your office.

This makes online backup one of the best and the most efficient ways to backup anything and everything you want. 

All you need is to choose and subscribe to one of the best business backup services. However, if you’re old school, read our article about the best offline backup software .

Benefits of Online Backup for Businesses

We’re going to talk about the reasons why online backup is a great option for your business as well as your personal data. If you’re convinced you need a backup service, you can jump straight to our business backup reviews to familiarize yourself with specific services.

Storage at a Remote Location

As we mentioned before, one of the key advantages of online backup services is the fact that you can store your files in a different, remote location. Even if there’s a fire or a hurricane in your city, you can rest assured that your data will be waiting for you after you deal with more immediate issues.

When you transfer your files to a data center that belongs to an online backup service, your data will be replicated to multiple servers, similar to a RAID setup. Servers are often located in different data centers, which makes your data redundant and enables you to access it regardless of potential downtime in any one data center.

In addition, data centers employ various security features to ensure the safety of your data. Those include fences, patrols, 24/7 surveillance, key-card access, cooling zones, fire suppression systems, backup generators, raised floors and more. If you want to know more about the methods in use, read our article about data center security.

Data centers are also more energy efficient, which means they consume less power and some of them derive it from sustainable sources. For more information about that, read our article about green cloud storage .

Access Your Files Anywhere, Anytime

Even though your data is in a remote location, that doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible. With online backup, you can access your data from your computer or by using the service’s web client. Plus, most of the backup services come with their own smartphone apps, which means you can manage your backup on the go.

Some services even let you backup your smartphone data, and we recommend that you do so, especially if you use the device for your business needs. You can find these services in our best online backup for mobile roundup. 

All this makes it possible to get your data without running to the office because you can now get whatever you want right from where you are. This constant access is what strengthens the popularity of online backup services.

Online Backup and Cost

Reducing costs helps any business, so it’s best if you don’t need to invest heavily in renting a space and paying for hefty power usage bills, thanks to the demand of running and cooling your own servers.

Online backup services do that for you and thus help you save money. Some of these services, such as Backblaze for Business, charge as little as $6 per month for unlimited backup for one computer. If you want to know more about it, read our Backblaze for Business review . You can find other affordable alternatives in our cheapest online backup list.

Instantaneous and Automatic

Once you create your initial backup plan using a service, you won’t have to constantly manage your backup. Instead, it happens instantly and automatically because backup services enable you to turn on continuous backup or set a schedule for your backup. 

This way, you can focus on your work while your files are copied to the cloud automatically in the background.

When a disaster happens, you can retrieve your data pretty quickly, as well, meaning that you won’t be wasting time and money, and customers may not even notice something is wrong.

Online backup services also make sure that the cloud security of your files is adequate so you don’t become a victim of cybercrime . Chances are you might, if you don’t have protection, because in the past year, ransomware attacks have more than doubled , according to ZDNet. Plus, hackers might steal your login credentials or read your sensitive data.

That said, cloud services have your back because they use methods to thwart these malicious actions against you. Private encryption will make sure only you can read your data, two-factor authentication will protect your credentials, while versioning will help you retrieve your data if you get hit by ransomware.

One of the most secure services is CrashPlan, and you can get the details of its security in our CrashPlan review .

Other Benefits

There are some services that have special features. Those might include photo analyzing, file sharing and syncing across multiple devices, which is basically copying files and any changes to them to multiple devices. 

File sharing and syncing are features borrowed from cloud storage. If you’re not clear on the difference between cloud storage and backup, read our explanation .

If you need file sharing and syncing, take a look at our IDrive for Business review . For AI-powered photo features and the ability to search through your backed up photos using various criteria, BigMIND Business is a great choice. Read more about it in our BigMIND Business review .

Image-Based vs. File-Based Backup

In general, you can make two kinds of backup: file level and image level. File-level backup lets you pick and choose files and folders. Image-level backups, on the other hand, replicate your entire system, which means you could recover all your data and applications if disaster strikes.

Both backup methods have their upsides and downsides, so choose the one that’s the right fit based on your needs and what you want to backup. If that involves image backup and you need ideas on services providing it, check out our best image-based backup article.

When to Backup?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule because it’s all just common sense. You have to envision a likely scenario that might make you lose your data so you can protect it in a timely manner.

With this in mind, you can rely on continuous backup, which ensures that the files you add or change are backed up. Continuous backup also uploads your data incrementally so you save on time and bandwidth.

That said, keep in mind that continuous backup might use a lot of computer resources, at times. If you want to avoid that, use a backup scheduler instead. First, though, make sure you know the critical times you need to backup your data.

Final Thoughts

Online backup has many advantages over traditional backup strategies and features that might help your business in other ways. The most significant upsides are disaster recovery, cost reduction and easy access to your files. You also get software security methods to protect your data, backup automatization and more time to do your actual work.

What do you think about backing up files to the cloud? Are you still hesitant, or are you ready to switch to online backup and benefit from its advantages? Tell us your thoughts in our comments section below. Thank you for reading.

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Backup Plan: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Your Data

A complex backup procedure requires a solid backup plan. GitLab.com, a multi-million dollar company, learned this the hard way after losing more than 300GB of data due to a failed backup procedure .

And sadly enough, they are not alone. It just so happens that fewer than 50% of disaster recovery plans manage to run to completion without any issues. And yes, that includes even MSPs, as they’re increasingly facing business continuity challenges due to poor data backup and recovery practices.

Now, the good thing is that such problems are entirely avoidable. And it all begins with a systematic backup plan. Tag along to find out how you can get started with creating and managing data backup plans.

Creating an MSP Backup Plan

Backup planning 1. assess the dataset.

For starters, you need to get a good idea of the structure and type of data you’ll be handling. That means analyzing all your clients’ datasets and then proceeding to classify them accordingly.

You could, for instance, classify them based on:

• Criticality : Mission-critical data should be prioritized over less essential datasets.
• Sensitivity : Sensitive data, such as healthcare, legal, financial, and personal information, is often protected by legislation, which you’ll be expected to comply with at all times.

Further reading 5 Best Practices for MSPs Serving Healthcare Customers

While you’re classifying your client’s datasets, you might also want to consider the following data categories:

• System Data : This includes operating system data, which, as it turns out, does not change that frequently in the backup lifecycle.
• Application Configuration Data : This refers to the software configuration files that form the building blocks of applications. As such, application configuration data should take priority over the application itself.
• Operational Data : These are the ever-changing files, like user documents, mailboxes, and databases. Since they’re all critical to your client’s business operations, you should keep them separate from other backups while maintaining high availability.

You could also classify the data based on its restoration urgency. Here is how:

• Hot Data : Refers to business-critical files that your clients access quite frequently. Hence, your data backup plan should update them on a regular basis while ensuring high availability.
• Cool Data : Unlike hot data, cool data is accessed infrequently because it’s not that critical. You can think of it as secondary data.
• Archive Data : Although archive data is rarely accessed, it’s typically retained for long periods of time for the sake of auditing or compliance.

Further reading Amazon S3, MS Azure, and Google Cloud Storage Pricing Comparison

Backup Planning 2. Work Out the Dangers

Once a backup administrator defines the datasets, it’s always suggested to conduct a comprehensive security audit to get a good idea of the type of vulnerabilities facing not just your system but also your clients’ infrastructures. Come up with a data backup plan that adequately seals all the identified loopholes.

Some of the potential dangers you ought to look out for include:

• Malware Risks : Hackers are increasingly creating sophisticated malware that’s capable of infiltrating moderately secure networks. In 2020 alone, SonicWall reported close to 10 billion malware attacks , most of which were targeting businesses and organizations. Such attacks are launched through ransomware , trojans, and all sorts of financially motivated worms.
• End-User Errors : You can lose critical organization data due to human error. Hackers are particularly fond of capitalizing on end-user errors to infiltrate networks and gain access to sensitive data. Try to strictly control the data access privileges.
• Hardware Failures : This type of failure is quite a common occurrence, even in the most advanced IT infrastructures. They range from system meltdowns and brownouts to power failures, communication breakdowns, and hard-drive crashes. According to a 2019 study by LogicMonitor , a whopping 96% of organizations had been hit by system outages within the preceding three years.
• Natural Disasters : Although natural disasters are not as common as, say, malware, they are extremely detrimental. Incidents like hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires have the potential to entirely destroy data storage devices. Now, this is the part where you might consider a hybrid backup plan that supplements local drives with remote cloud backup servers. The more backup locations you have, the better the odds of recovering after a natural disaster.
• Loss of Key Staff Members : Imagine losing an admin who holds the only master password to your organization’s cryptocurrency wallet or losing an employee to a competitor who’d benefit greatly from your trade secrets. The loss of a key staff member could hurt your system. So, create a backup process that guarantees business continuity when they leave.

Backup Planning 3. Choose the Method

There are different backup methods, so try to choose the perfect backup method and then match it up with an ideal backup format, plus an adequately dynamic data retention framework.

Type of Backup Storage

There are three principal options:   local backup , cloud backup , and hybrid backup .

A local backup strategy offers high data availability plus unlimited control of all the resources and policies. But it’s quite costly and technically demanding.

Cloud backups are conveniently cheap and remotely accessible. They offer limited control and slow data recovery rates.

With hybrid cloud backups, you get all the bells and whistles of local and cloud storage. Besides, it helps you keep up with a 3-2-1 backup strategy .

Type of Backup

The type of backup you end up choosing here depends on how and what you want to back up. You could, for example, proceed with a backup solution that stores data in files, or perhaps go for one that specializes in virtual machine backup and recovery.

If you’re looking for simplicity, one of the most straightforward formats you could try out is “ system image backup ”. This essentially allows you to copy, compress, and back up pretty much everything from a hard drive partition—including the OS, applications, drivers, etc.

A full backup , on the other hand, gives you the chance to pick the specific datasets you’d like to back up. This is the standard type of backup, and it comes in two primary forms:

Incremental Backup : Refers to a backup system that proceeds to update backed-up files by uploading only the data that was altered since the previous backup instance. Hence, it’s convenient and resource-efficient, especially when it’s block-level enabled.

Without block-level, however, incremental backup may not be the best for large and dynamically changing files. Instead of focusing on just the data changes, it keeps re-uploading entire files—which increases the load on the resources.

When it comes to data recovery, incremental block-level backups have always proven to be comparatively slow.

Differential Backup : Unlike incremental backup, differential backup usually maintains all the altered files since the first full backup. That means your data volume will progressively expand with each backup instance.

On the flip side, though, at least differential backup offers a much faster data recovery process.

Further reading Frequently Asked Questions About Backups: Everything You Should Know

Retention Policy

While you are making up your mind on the type of storage and backup, you ought to come up with an appropriate data retention policy .

Consider also throwing in a lifecycle policy that spells out the length of time you intend to store each dataset. You’re free to hold it even for years.

Otherwise, you can go ahead and set your backup software to automatically delete outdated files from time to time. For example, you could have the system purge old files after exceeding their file version limit.

MSP360 Managed Backup offers a simple and straightforward tool for managing such parameters. With its Retention Policy feature , you get to automatically set up and delete versions of your backed-up files. In the meantime, the system tracks every single copy throughout its lifecycle and offers you a detailed list of each file’s previous versions.

Backup Planning 4. Test the Recovery

Before you fully deploy your backup, it’s only right that you take it for a test ride. Your data backup plan should include a comprehensive testing procedure to confirm that everything runs smoothly. And, most importantly, you should run a data recovery test to assess your restore speeds and disaster recovery capabilities.

Since different types of backups come with varying structures, they present various data recovery challenges. Remember to test out all the types of backups and confirm whether they are recoverable.

For instance, incremental block-level backups might require quite some time to prepare recovery downloads, while differential backups are built to begin the download process almost immediately. The same applies to clustered VM servers and file-level backups, as the former is much more complicated than the latter.

hbspt.cta.load(5442029, 'a99bf554-4786-40d2-8e73-43bf625d6417', {});

In the end, your recovery testing will only be successful if the backups manage to meet your recovery expectations and goals. This is where you keep a close eye on the RTO and RPO .

RTO, or recovery time objective, specifies the time it takes to restore all the system resources after a disaster. The lower the RTO, the higher the chances of business continuity.

RPO, on the other hand, stands for recovery point objective. It helps you establish your optimal data backup frequency by calculating and defining your maximum tolerable data loss. This, in other words, is the highest possible volume of data your organization can afford to lose during a disaster.

But that’s not all. RPO is also critical in determining the maximum amount of time you can afford between the last data backup instance and a disaster.

Recovery testing is not a one-time thing. Schedule the tests and keep redoing them every now and then to identify any developing loopholes. This will help you avoid potentially costly failures in the future.

Managing Data Backup Plans in Complex Environments

Different datasets and types of devices.

MSPs occasionally find themselves with backup plans that encompass a mixture of everything. Some of them happen to back up different types of operating systems, cloud workloads, databases, apps, and datasets. Then, others deal with a vast array of devices at the same time, including mobile phones, cloud services, virtual machines, servers, and desktop PCs.

Of course, this would complicate your whole backup plan since varying workloads require different solutions. If you’re lucky, though, you might find a dynamic backup solution that holistically integrates everything.

Whatever you end up picking, we strongly advise you to keep documenting the subsequent backup and recovery procedures. This will ensure business continuity in your absence.

A Large Number of Similar Devices

Complex device environments do not always stem from the presence of different types of devices. In some cases, they are triggered by a huge volume of devices sharing one network.

Try to come up with a simple and manageable systematic structure. Find yourself a software solution that tracks the devices individually and then intuitively displays the subsequent insights on a well-centralized reporting window. Keep tabs on multiple devices simultaneously and distinguish their individual backup plans.

Further reading Introduction to Endpoint Monitoring and Management

With this, you should be able to keep tabs on multiple devices at the same time, as well as easily distinguish their individual backup plans.

Set up an image-based backup and then use it across the board. This should speed up the setup process. When everything is up and running, you could set the individual PCs to back up only their respective user files.

Set up an image-based backup and then use it across the board. This should speed up the setup process since all you need to do is recover the image-based backup on any new device. When everything is up and running, you could set the individual PCs to back up only their respective user files.

MSP360 offers a fast and simple full system backup and restore process for both Windows desktop and Windows Server . Check some of the features and benefits that you get with MSP360 Backup for Windows Server:

MSP360 Backup unlocks recovery from both system state backup and system image backup .

Easily create a bootable USB drive or ISO file for a bare-metal recovery in case of a system or hardware crash. Install additional drivers for a hardware configuration that is different from the current machine. It brings recovery to the point in time that you choose.

Store as many versions as you need for as long as you need, with flexible retention settings.

Compression and Encryption

Compression allows you to reduce storage (and thus save money) while improving backup time. With AES-256 encryption, you can be sure that all your files are protected.

Enable best-in-class data protection with AWS , Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage , BackBlaze B2 , Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure .

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Why To Have A Backup Plan & Disaster Recovery Plan for Small Business

As 2022 winds down, having a disaster recovery and backup plan for your small business should be top of mind for 2023. Many small and medium-sized organizations experienced cybersecurity attacks in 2022 that shut their business down for some time. Regardless of how long that period of time was, the reality is that those businesses lost revenue, and their brand image was impacted as a result. 

It’s no longer a matter of if but when . As such, preparation is critical. You need to have a backup plan for your small business. By having a disaster recovery/backup plan in place, you are protecting your business and ensuring that you can recover, despite “disaster.”

In this blog, we will discuss why a backup plan for your small business is so important to keep your business (and sales) up and running, why Azure Site Recovery/Backup is our recommended backup plan for your small business and three ways that Azure Site Recovery/Backup can help your small business.

Why Small Businesses Need a Disaster Recovery Plan in 2023?

A lesson for your small business into 2023: be prepared. You cannot predict the things that will happen, but you can ensure that you have a plan in place to deal with them. This means having a disaster recovery and backup plan in place for small businesses. Whether dealing with hackers, natural disasters, or human error, you cannot let events such as these derail your business.

Many small businesses don’t want to acknowledge that this can happen to them, too, thinking that larger enterprise businesses will be the target of hackers. This is not the case. Small businesses are just as much of a target. 43% of cyberattacks are aimed at small to medium businesses and may be more vulnerable to the effects of having a disaster taking your business offline. 

Check out the short video below to learn more about Azure Site Recovery:

2 main reasons why having a backup plan for your small business is critical.

Data and Disaster Recovery aren’t typically synonymous with Sales, but they aren’t as far apart as you’d think. Having a Disaster Recovery/backup plan in place for your small business is an essential facet of good customer service, which is a central tenet of Sales.

Below we discuss the two main areas of customer service that can negatively impact your sales and your company as a whole if a disaster recovery/backup plan is not in place.

(Not) In Service  ⚙️

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a regular day or one where you’re in crisis mode; either way, you need to be able to take care of your customers – or your competitors will . Even if you have the most outstanding sales rep ever working for your company, they can’t make any sales if the business has been taken offline by an event, whether from hackers or a natural disaster.

By having a backup plan for your small business, you can ensure that your business will continue to function with minimal interruptions, something that is key for continued Sales success.

Maintain Trust  🔒

In Sales, trust is critical. Once you’ve worked hard to earn that trust, you don’t want to lose it over a data hack. If you look at the recent example of Uber, where a hack compromised the data of 57 million users, the damage to their brand from being unprepared was considerable – and avoidable. Instead of acknowledging that the hack happened, they paid the hackers a bribe and tried to keep it a secret. When it inevitably came to light, it became far more damaging than if it had been handled adequately in the first place.

For your sales team, trust is critical to maintaining good client relationships and helps build confidence in your brand. As such, you must protect your customers and their data. A disaster recovery and data backup plan for your small business can ensure their trust is not misplaced.

Azure Site Recovery/Backup for Small Business

Let’s consider the following scenario: your sales team is working on a big deal – if they land it, this could mean over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue for your organization. They’ve worked for several weeks to close this customer and have finally progressed to the ‘close’ phase. They need to provide the customer with a finalized quote by the end of business Wednesday. But, on Tuesday night, you get a call from your local fire department… there’s been extensive fire and water damage done to your building.

So, the question becomes, do you have a Disaster Recovery/backup Plan in place? Are you able to get up and running in time to help your sales team meet that 5 o’clock deadline the next day?

Of course, disasters aren’t limited to natural disasters, like fires… In fact, the most common causes of IT disasters come from operational failures, like power failures, hardware/software failures, and/or network failures.

This is where Azure Site Recovery/Backup comes into play. Azure Site Recovery (or ASR) allows you to protect your environment in an effort to ensure that you have business continuity in the event of a disaster (like the fire scenario above).

Azure Site Recovery replicates your servers (whether they’re physical or Cloud-based), fails over, and recovers workloads so that they can remain available to your small business if a failure of any kind occurs. Backup service works to keep your organization’s data safe and recoverable.

Simply put, Azure Site Recovery/Backup allows you to proactively protect your organization’s environment and enjoy peace of mind knowing that your environment is fully protected. It never hurts to have a backup plan in place.

• Related Post: Disaster Recovery Plan for Small Businesses – Why Is It Important and How To Build It?

3 Ways Azure Site Recovery/Backup Can Help Your Small Business Survive

#1 – azure site recovery/backup allows your small business to test your disaster recovery options 📝.

If you have a Disaster Recovery/Backup Plan, have you ever tested it? Do you test it regularly to ensure that, in the event of a disaster, your Plan will perform to your expectations and get you up and running as fast as you need to? Not all Disaster Recovery/Backup Plans are easy to test – in fact, if you’re using a third-party provider, they may not even allow you to test it because of the level of complexity surrounding the test.

With Azure Site Recovery, you can test your Plan whenever you want. And running any Disaster Recovery drills won’t have an impact on your primary systems, either. By allowing failover to your backup environment to ensure it’s working, you can give you – and your employees – the assurance and the confidence they need that, in the event of a disaster, your system will function as it should.

#2 – Orchestrated Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for Your Small Business ⚙️

As much as we wish it weren’t so, disasters will hit everyone sooner or later. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when” a disaster strikes. Small businesses are just as at risk as large corporations. That’s why it’s essential to be proactive and have a backup plan for your small business. There are a lot of Disaster Recovery solutions out there today, but Azure Site Recovery ranks up there as one of the best.

Why is this? Because Azure Site Recovery is capable of automating the recovery of services if a site outage happens. This means that your backup system can be set up to kick in should a disaster occur automatically. Even if your organization has complex, multi-tiered workloads, you can still bring over applications in an orchestrated way so that your vital services are restored quickly.

Let's look at the fire scenario in the section above. This means that the sales deal your team has worked so hard on closing won’t be affected when that disaster strikes – Azure Site Recovery will automatically fail over to your backup site. Your team can send that finalized quote to the customer by the deadline.

#3 - Your Data is Always Being Backed Up Through Continual Replication 🔄

Let’s return to our scenario in the section above and apply it to your business: What would happen if a fire broke out in your building? Do you have a solid enough Disaster Recovery/Backup Plan to keep your small business going with minimal interruptions? How soon would it be before you could get back up and running? A few hours? A few weeks? A few months ?

If you use Azure Site Recovery for your small business’s backup plan, you have the opportunity for continuous replication, depending on your server type. This means that your data could be replicated constantly, so all of your data would be available to you from the moment you choose to failover to your backup system.

So, if your organization had a fire (like in the scenario we gave), you could failover to your backup system and be up and running, quite literally, with a few clicks of a mouse.

A Backup Plan for Small Businesses is An Important Facet of Good Customer Service

Here’s how a Disaster Recovery/Backup Plan should affect your small business: Your organization suffers a disastrous event, so you failover to your Azure Site Recovery backup the moment you discover how the disaster has impacted your business. Since you had a backup plan for your small business, your sales team sends your prospective client the final quote by the deadline, the customer signs it, and you sit back and celebrate landing that hundred-thousand-dollar deal.

This is why the Disaster Recovery/Backup plan is essential to small businesses! It helps you continue to take care of your customers, and with a solid Disaster Recovery/Backup plan, you can maintain your data and keep your customers’ trust. And Azure Site Recovery/Backup is a reliable solution that helps protect your organization’s environment, giving you peace of mind knowing your environment is fully protected.

Interested in how Azure Site Recovery/Backup can help your small business? Talk to ProServeIT today – our experts can help you set up the right disaster recovery plan for your small business.

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Making a Backup Plan Undermines Performance

• Alison Beard

Could contingency plans increase your chances of failure?

The Study: Jihae Shin of Wisconsin School of Business and her coauthor, Katherine Milkman of Wharton, gave 160 university students a sentence-unscrambling task and promised an energy bar to those who performed it well. Before receiving the text to work on, half the participants were asked to think about different ways they could obtain free food on campus should they fail to earn the snack. People prompted to think about those backup plans unscrambled significantly fewer sentences, on average, than people who hadn’t been asked to formulate a plan B.

• Alison Beard is an executive editor at Harvard Business Review and previously worked as a reporter and editor at the Financial Times. A mom of two, she tries—and sometimes succeeds—to apply management best practices to her household. alisonwbeard

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Hope For The Best, Prepare For The Worst: Data Backup Strategies

Summary: This 3-minute article discusses the importance of small businesses planning for data recovery in the face of breakdowns, cyberattacks and unexpected disasters. Learn the crucial steps to ensure your business data is protected and you are prepared to restore your data and be fully operational as swiftly as possible after an event. Contact GEEKAID Computer and Network Support at https://www.geek-aid.com/ for more comprehensive business IT solutions and guidance on planning for unexpected events.

What Is Data Recovery?

Nobody enjoys planning for the unexpected. Often, we put off planning for unforeseen events until confronted with one. By then, it is too late for planning. But, for small businesses, a lack of proper planning for negative events opens the possibility for them to lose their company’s most crucial data to hardware failures, natural disasters and cyberattacks. For businesses to thrive, they must have a plan for protecting, saving and recovering data in the event of emergencies.

Wikipedia ( https:// en.wikipedia.org /wiki/ Data_recovery ) defines data recovery as “a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media, or files when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives, solid-state drives, USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs RAID subsystems and other electronic devices.”

Why Backup Business Data?

For many companies, their data is their most valuable asset. Without access to their data, many companies would be unable to operate. Unfortunately, cybercrime has increased by over 400% since before the pandemic and one of the hackers' primary goals is to breach data unlawfully. In addition to thwarting business operations, a data breach can affect customers and vendors. Once a hacker has access to your system, everyone connected to your company is at risk. Even if your SMB is not attacked, data corruption without a backup can lead to disastrous consequences. Regaining access to data that has been compromised is critical to minimizing any resulting damages. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to protect your small to midsized business data:

• Define Your Data Threats – Beyond cyberattacks, businesses must be prepared for all forms of emergencies, including fires, natural disasters, power outages, etc. By identifying the threats, planning for data recovery will be more comprehensive.
• Install Robust Security Protection – The goal of cyber security is to detect, mitigate and stop cyberattacks on your data. By having a data recovery plan in place, when data breaches occur, you will be in a better position to reduce the damage, eliminate the threat and restore your data for full functionality.
• Identify The Data Most Critical To Operating Your Business – For a data recovery plan to be most effective, SMBs should prioritize the data in order of which data segments are most critical for continuing company operations. By understanding the relative importance of each category of your business’s data, you will understand what data is most important and how employees access it.
• Set Goals For Your Data Recovery – By knowing which company data is most valuable, you can then calculate recovery point objectives or RPO. RPOs are calculations of the maximum amount of crucial data your SMB can afford to lose. Also, recovery plans should set recovery time objectives or RTOs. By setting goals and prioritizing data SMB management can better plan data backups and perform restoration as quickly as possible.
• Test And Update Your Data Recovery Plan – To know whether or not your recovery plan is viable, it should be tested to identify any gaps. Also, data recovery plans are not “one and done.” Recovery plans must be fluid, evolving with the company’s growth and evolving to protect against new threats and address the ever-changing target landscape of cyber criminals. In addition, regular IT maintenance and hardware contingencies should be included in your plan. Planning and policies are key, but failing software, hardware and network connections must also be addressed. The more detailed the plan, the smoother and more timely the data recovery will be.
• Design A Company Data Protection Policy – Data protection best practices are a company-wide responsibility. All employees must be on the same page concerning the proper handling of company data and what to do when the company falls victim to a data-related event. By creating and updating the data protection policy, all your employees will know how they can best support your company’s data protection.

Your Business Needs A Data Backup And Recovery Plan

Creating a comprehensive data protection and recovery plan is well worth the time and money. If a cyberattack or emergency puts your data at risk, having a plan in place will prepare you and your employees for potential data threats in advance. It is never a good scenario to have company data threatened. Still, with careful preparation and a thorough plan, you can protect your SMB from crippling data breaches and losses and work as a team to restore your data and get your company back to full operations in as little time as possible.

bits, bytes & other nibbles

• May 2, 2019

Backup 101: What is a data backup plan?

Without having a proper backup plan in place, you're setting your business up for failure. For a small company, you might be thinking backing up to an external hard drive once a year is sufficient, but think about all the business crucial information you wouldn't be able to function without.

According to Datto’s State of the Channel Ransomware Report , Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) is the most effective business protection against ransomeware. With a proper BDR plan in place, 96% of businesses were able to recover from a ransomeware attack, compared to 40% who were unable to recover quickly and fully. More so, more than 40% of companies that experience a disaster never reopen . These disasters could be caused by ransomware or malware, but also fires, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

A backup plan is just that -- a strategy detailing all the files you are going to backup, when you are going to run your backups, and how long you will retain that information, etc. Just like writing down your personal goals makes them more likely to happen, writing down your backup plan helps ensure you are sticking to the plan. Have someone accountable for checkpoints along the way. At DATASTOR™ we love these seven pillars for a good backup plan:

Determine what to backup and why (Plan)

Decide how how often to backup your data (Schedule)

Target backups to quality disk with built-in redundancy or replication (Store)

Back up data on-site and off-site (Copy)

Keep your data as long as it is needed (Retain)

Trust but verify (Validate)

Confirm recoverability (Test)

In general, a DATASTOR™ best practice uses a full system backup, for bare metal recovery, scheduled to run at least once a day. The full system backup image supports individual file and folder recovery, so accidental deletes can be quickly restored and at the same time, keep you always prepared for a disk crash that requires full recovery. The full system backup is recommended to eliminate the guesswork out of figuring out what to backup and why. Let the deduplication technology eliminate the redundancy between backups and across servers.

Keep two on-site copies and at least one off-site copy. Retain for a minimum of six months (or as long as the data has business value). Run daily, weekly, and monthly Verify tasks against the target backup device.  And run fire drills to test and validate recoverability in preparation for the real event.

Backup 101 Terminology-

Bare Metal Recovery (BMR): restores your entire computer, operating system, application, settings and data to a pre-defined point-in-time

Restore (Recover): to replace existing data from a backup copy

Off-site copy: Cloud storage, cold storage of tape or disk, near line hard disk storage; beyond the perimeter of a local disaster (fire, flood, tornado, cyberattack, etc.)

On-site copy: Replica of backup data that can be used to recover if the primary storage fails

Verify Tasks: Performs integrity checks of backed up data to ensure recoverability

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Understanding data backup, recovery, and business continuity

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Table of contents

Introduction: disaster recovery or business continuity, why the risk, what type of data is most at risk, protect, recover, and resume operations, business continuity services.

Most businesses are not backing up their data appropriately. If they suffer a data-loss event,  they risk losing the ability to run processes that rely on that data. 

This is worse than just a slowdown or temporary roadblock: Loss of core processes can quickly overwhelm a business’s ability to survive.  Hence when we talk about backing up data, what we are really talking about is protecting the ability to continue in business. This is why it is extremely important to understand the term business continuity .

Having a business continuity solution means having a plan. Not just backing up data and hoping for the best, but actually knowing which data is essential to core business processes, storing it in ways that ensure redundancy, and having a system for restarting the processes that use it. 

A business with a continuity plan can suffer unscheduled downtime or a data-loss event and recover within minutes, rather than the hours or days required with traditional backup and recovery methods, if recovery is possible at all. 

Some essential terminology here is  RPO and RTO.  Put simply, these are parameters that determine how much data a business can lose and how long they can be out of operation before there are significant business impacts, or business survival is threatened.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) –  This determines the amount of data at risk and how much can be lost before business operations are impacted. A business continuity plan will use RPO to set the frequency and thoroughness of backups.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – This determines the length of downtime a business can withstand. A business continuity plan will use RTO to set system and application restoration time limits, in other words, how quickly business operations are restarted after a data disaster occurs.

Note: A business’s RPO and RTO settings will be impacted by industry-specific factors, like the sensitivity of their data and the demands of their regulatory compliance. Cost also plays a role, both in the cost of lost operations and the cost of implementing the business continuity plan, including storage solutions and outsourcing services. Additionally, the type of data that is being protected needs to be taken into account. Static, non-changing data does not need to be backed up as frequently as an operational database where transactional data is continually changing.

The main reason people are not protecting their data, and by extension their business operations, is because of the misconception that it is already being done for them.  Business leaders want to believe their IT people have something in place to ensure information cannot be lost. 

Unfortunately, this is one of the most common laments after disaster strikes.

Another related mistaken belief is that Microsoft 365 – and specifically the OneDrive and SharePoint platforms – protect users’ data. In fact, where Microsoft’s responsibility for data protection ends and the user’s begins is difficult to determine. 

Policies are different for each application in Microsoft 365, and in fact Microsoft itself recommends using third party backup solutions. For a very simple example of how unsecure data is within Microsoft 365, those ‘recycle bins’ store data for only 93 days .  After that, it is impossible (or extremely difficult) to recover anything.  We’ll look more closely at these kinds of issues with Microsoft 365 data security later.

Other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, like Salesforce or Dropbox, should be considered equally unreliable. 

Essentially, every business that uses cloud services should be concerned about data loss, because the service providers’ backup policies do not guarantee a complete restore of lost data. None of them are effectively backing up their users’ data securely , or ensuring that data is available for immediate retrieval in case of a data breach or disaster.

This means most businesses won’t be able to recover to their original state if they suffer a SaaS data loss event. 

In many cases, they may not recover at all.  Similarly, if a business has chosen the local storage option, then on premises hardware failure, natural disaster, or ransomware lockout can also render their data impossible to restore. 

Either way, with cybersecurity concerns on the rise, business leaders simply can’t afford to think a data disaster won’t happen to them.

Now, let’s look at the business data typically most at risk and ways to make it safe.

On premises data

This refers to the data stored on local hardware: servers, desktops, laptops, and other devices kept on site. 

This data is not in the cloud. Depending on the design of the IT infrastructure, this could be a large or small portion of a business’s total data that needs protecting. Typical risk factors include those common to all physical assets: fires, floods, breakdowns and break-ins. 

Making the situation worse is a lack of adequate backup and recovery options for on premises data, and the need for users to be trained how to save data properly. These risk factors make keeping on premises servers an increasingly unpopular approach, replaced by increasingly secure virtual servers.

Cloud virtual servers and SaaS platforms

Cloud virtual servers store business data off premises, in the cloud. While there are many security benefits to cloud storage solutions, they need to be protected just as much as on premises hardware. 

Whether it is a company’s own virtual server or one from a SaaS provider, there is a common misconception that they are constantly backed up and therefore unable to fail. In fact, around a third of SaaS users report losing data in the cloud. 

The big SaaS providers like Google G Suite, Dropbox, and Salesforce do have the very best security and recovery capabilities. However, they are concerned with recovering their own resources, and make vague/weak promises regarding their users’ data. It’s therefore impossible to rely on these companies to protect their users’ business continuity: Virtual servers and SaaS platform data must be backed up . According to the data protection research group, Ponemon Institute , there are four main risk factors for cloud/SaaS data:

• Cybercrime : Around half of all data loss is the result of hacking, specifically phishing/ransomware attacks which lock users out of their data until they pay a ransom.
• Malicious action : This is intentional deletion or theft of data by unhappy employees or industrial espionage.
• Synchronization : Businesses today typically use different software services for their HR, accounting, CRM, and other daily processes. Keeping data updated and consistent across these SaaS platforms is a challenge, and synchronization errors can result in data loss.
• Human error : Accidentally deleting messages, documents, files, or entire accounts is incredibly common and can permanently erase the data.

Microsoft 365 data

Microsoft is a SaaS provider, but due to the popularity and all-encompassing nature of Microsoft 365, it deserves its own category. 

As mentioned earlier, Microsoft themselves recommend a third party backup provider within their environment. The infrastructure of Microsoft 365 (formerly called Office 365) is not unified, meaning each application’s backup capabilities and practices vary. As many unhappy users have discovered, restoring data from Microsoft usually does not work. Earlier we saw the relatively simple issue of recycle bins only keeping data for 93 days. On the 94th day, or if those bins have been emptied at any time, the data is gone. The very serious implication is that this is true for the crucial SharePoint and OneDrive storage platforms which facilitate collaboration between Microsoft 365 applications. For dedicated applications like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and multi-function tools like Teams, most data is stored in SharePoint or OneDrive, so the above risk factors apply. 

OneDrive does offer a ‘restore’ feature, promising to return the application to any point in the previous 30 days. However, this is not as promising as it seems, because the action will delete all changes made during this period, even those the user wishes to keep. And anything prior to 30 days is unreachable. 

Regarding email in Microsoft 365, the Exchange Online server keeps deleted items for only 14 days by default, expandable to 30 days. A quick online search will return countless calls for help from people trying to retrieve accidentally deleted emails from beyond these time frames.

Note: In Microsoft’s defense, it should be noted that they are constantly working to upgrade the security and data protection capabilities of Microsoft 365, so by the time you read this some of these issues may be less severe.

Now we’re going to discuss how to protect your data and your business.

The key takeaway from all of this is that for a business trying to protect its data, and by extension its survival, success requires vigilance and a serious time investment into understanding risk. 

If they do not constantly monitor and backup their data across multiple servers, platforms, and applications, there is a significant risk of data loss. And if some or all of their backups are successfully recovered, they need to know how to use the data to restore their processes correctly, as quickly as possible. 

For businesses attempting DIY business continuity, here are some best practices for data backup and recovery: 

• Make multiple copies of data in different locations, combining offline, online in the cloud, and through external third-party applications.
• Develop the ability to have complete restoration of any data item, from a point in time appropriate to the changing nature and criticality of the data.
• Create clearly defined data management policies and train staff on where and how to store personal and business data.

Once backup and recovery practices are in place, the business can be confident its data is always protected and available. 

Next, they need to know they can get back in operation after a data loss event or downtime. There needs to be a plan for resuming operations after an interruption – protocols for the order of restoring data, and the order of restarting processes. 

This business continuity plan must be documented and meet the specific needs of the business, including the RPO and RTO recovery objectives explained above. There may also be parameters set by industry or regulatory bodies. There are several ways to arrive at a solid business continuity solution. The DIY approach is for those willing and able to invest the resources in research and training. Business continuity services are available, but vary in quality and completeness. They are discussed in the following section.

For both approaches, let’s take a look at some typical strong and weak data management practices, relating to risk. 

A solid business continuity service will typically apply three core approaches. 

The first is using hybrid data security – keeping multiple copies of data in different locations offline and in the cloud. Backup frequency is defined by the client’s RPO and RTO requirements, and includes complete server image backups. This gives the ability to restore any data item, from almost any point in time.

The second approach is to prioritize Microsoft 365 and other SaaS platform backups . Cloud computing services will only increase in popularity, given their ability to reduce or eliminate on premises maintenance costs and deliver enterprise-grade technologies to smaller businesses. Backing up data from SaaS platforms will give complete control to the user and ensure quick and complete return to operations if disaster strikes. 

Finally, business continuity requires recovery planning , a defined process for bringing all systems back online. Roles and responsibilities will be defined and all stakeholders trained. It is essential that this plan is regularly tested. 

Contact us for a data protection consultation

If you are new to business continuity, rest assured – Leverage IT is not.  We have been creating custom backup, recovery, and return-to-business solutions for two decades. 

We will start by taking a look at your current preparedness, then provide a customized plan for backing up and recovering each of your business-critical processes. This plan will include training for your staff and regular testing by our engineers. The results will ensure the resilience of your business. 

SECURE – Leverage IT’s business continuity and disaster recovery management service – covers all bases . 

It entails a complete implementation of data security best practices and ongoing processes to backup ALL your business data, whether it be onsite, in the cloud, or as part of software. In the event of a disaster, it provides a step-by-step, turnkey recovery that brings everything back exactly how you left it.

To find out more about our SECURE Business Continuity service, click on the button below to visit the SECURE page.

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Table of Contents

What is the right business backup plan for you?

Any link of setback may approach you unexpectedly and this is the reason why you need to always prepare yourself. No matter whether your business is small or huge, you need to prepare a business backup plan to face the most unexpected situation.

When do you need a business backup plan?

You need a business backup plan for the following situation:

• When the data get accidentally deleted
• Mission data become corrupt
• In the case of natural calamity
• Computer data crash

A business backup plan serves as the Plan B for any business and should be created with the foresight of unexpected events which may come in the way. The strategy of the formulation of a business backup should be done carefully so that it can really serve the purpose later on. The following questions should be kept in mind while preparing the right business backup plan which can be effective during the period of crisis.

Why do you need to have a business back up?

A backup plan can be used to restore or recover the lost data or to maintain the availability of the service. You have to understand which one your main purpose is for creating a business backup. Obviously, a backup plan can serve more or less all the purposes of back up but identifying the main aim can narrow down your options and help you to choose the appropriate strategy for formulating a business backup.

What do you need to back up?

You need to understand what information is to be provided in the business backup plan. As you may feel that everything needs to be backed up, you may opt for image-level backup, where all the information is backed up under a single data set. It is always essential to back up at least the critical data to survive in the crisis period. Thus, it is essential to detect the critical data that you definitely need to back up.

How often do you want to recreate a business backup plan?

Business backup plan is based on the foresight of the creator. You may create a business backup plan for 1 year, 5 years, 10 years or 20years. But while strategizing for the business back up, you should clear idea of the time frame you want to select so that the backup plan can serve the purpose in the right time.

Which method do you want to use for back up?

One may opt for an external hard drive plan or an online-based back up according to the requirement of the convenience of data storing. External hard drive plan is transferring the data to external hardware while online-based back up is about storing the data online which can be accessed later on by syncing. Deciding what method is to be used plays an important role in strategizing business backup.

Under what circumstances a business backup can protect you?

As mentioned before, this business backup plan is completely based on foresight. Thus, one should decide on which unexpected event you are preparing for. It is more like planning for a trip without knowing the destination. It is more like imagining a situation of calamity you are in and how your backup can support you in such a situation.

After a complete analysis of the above question, you will be able to decide the right kind of business backup you want. As a regular backup can cost you a lot, one generally seeks to formulate a plan that can be effective in the long term.

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How To Start A Business Plan: A Step-By-Step Guide

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Creating a business plan is a critical first step for any entrepreneur. Knowing how to start a business plan will help you create a roadmap, guiding your business from startup to growth and beyond. Whether you're looking for investment, trying to set clear goals, or simply organizing your thoughts, a solid business plan can make all the difference.

Here is a guide to help you get started on your business plan:

1. executive summary.

What It Is: This section summarizes your business plan as a whole and outlines your company profile and goals.

What to Include:

• Business name and location
• Products or services offered
• Mission statement
• The purpose of the plan (e.g., seeking funding, guiding the startup process)

Tip: Keep it concise. Although it's the first section, it's often best to write it last, after you’ve detailed everything else.

2. Company Description

What It Is: This section provides detailed information about your company, including who you are, what you do, and what markets you serve.

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• Your business structure (e.g., sole proprietorship, LLC, corporation)
• The industry and marketplace needs your business meets
• Your business’s objectives and how you stand out from competitors

Tip: Use this section to highlight your company’s strengths and what makes you unique.

3. Market Research

What It Is: Market research demonstrates your understanding of the industry and target market.

• Market size and growth potential
• Target customer demographics
• Market trends and outlook
• Competitive analysis, including strengths and weaknesses of competitors

Tip: Include data and statistics to back up your findings and show that you’ve done your homework.

4. Organization and Management

What It Is: This section outlines your business’s organizational structure and management team.

• Organizational chart
• Information about the ownership of the company
• Backgrounds and qualifications of the management team
• Roles and responsibilities within the company

Tip: Highlight the skills and experiences of your team that will help the business succeed.

5. Products or Services Line

What It Is: Here, you detail the products or services you offer or plan to offer.

• A description of each product or service
• The lifecycle of products or services
• Research and development activities, if applicable
• Intellectual property, such as patents or trademarks

Tip: Focus on the benefits your products or services bring to your customers.

6. Marketing and Sales Strategy

What It Is: This section explains how you will attract and retain customers.

• Marketing strategies, including advertising, promotions, and public relations
• Sales strategies, including sales processes, channels, and tactics
• Pricing strategy and how it compares to competitors

Tip: Ensure your marketing and sales strategies are aligned with your market research findings.

7. Funding Request

What It Is: If you’re seeking funding , this section outlines your requirements.

• Your current funding needs
• Future funding requirements over the next five years
• How you intend to use the funds
• Potential future financial plans (e.g., selling the business, repaying debt)

Tip: Be specific and realistic about how much funding you need and how it will be used.

8. Financial Projections

What It Is: Financial projections provide a forecast of your business’s financial future.

• Income statements
• Cash flow statements
• Balance sheets
• Break-even analysis

Tip: Use realistic and conservative estimates. Consider hiring a financial professional to help with this section if needed.

9. Appendix

What It Is: The appendix includes any additional information that supports your business plan.

• Resumes of key management team members
• Permits and leases
• Legal documents
• Detailed market research data
• Product photos

Tip: Only include essential information that adds value to your business plan.

Final Tips for Creating a Business Plan

Creating a business plan requires clarity and precision. First and foremost, keep your business plan clear and concise. Avoid using jargon or complex language that could make the plan difficult to read or understand. Your aim should be to communicate your ideas effectively and efficiently.

Next, be realistic in your approach. Ensure that your goals and financial projections are attainable based on your research and understanding of the market. Overly ambitious projections can undermine your credibility and potentially lead to unrealistic expectations.

It's also essential to remember that a business plan is a dynamic document. As your business grows and market conditions change, you should revisit and revise your plan regularly. This helps you stay aligned with your goals and adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

Finally, seek feedback from experienced business professionals. Having someone with business experience review your plan can provide valuable insights and help identify any potential issues or areas for improvement. Their feedback can enhance the overall quality and effectiveness of your business plan.

By following these tips, you'll be better equipped to create a robust and effective business plan that can guide your business towards success.

The bottom line is that starting a business plan may seem challenging, but with careful planning and attention to detail, you can create a comprehensive guide to steer your business toward success. Use this step-by-step guide to ensure that all essential components are covered, giving your business the best possible start.

Melissa Houston, CPA is the author of Cash Confident: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating a Profitable Business and the founder of She Means Profit . As a Business Strategist for small business owners, Melissa helps women making mid-career shifts, to launch their dream businesses, and I also guide established business owners to grow their businesses to more profitably.

The opinions expressed in this article are not intended to replace any professional or expert accounting and/or tax advice whatsoever.

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When and Why You Should Have a Back-up Plan

• June 20, 2016

Here’s hoping you’re ready for a great work week ahead…. And it will be great if you have every important “Plan B” in order.

What’s a Plan B? It’s the backup to Plan A, of course…. It’s your contingency, your lifeline, your sanity when the going gets rough and Plan A falls through. The thing is, we’re all so busy these days getting our first priorities squared away, we barely have time to consider the “what if” scenarios that are lurking out there. For example:

• You’ve scheduled a flight from Baltimore to New York at a specific time so you can make a critical meeting later in the day. But the plane is delayed indefinitely. What’s your Plan B?
• That report you completed yesterday has suddenly “vanished.” There’s no way to know what happened to it, and your boss needs it ASAP. What’s your Plan B?
• Your eldest child is sick at school, but you’re expected to give a presentation in 10 minutes. What’s your Plan B?

The list goes on and on. I’m sure you can think of a number of times when having a Plan B would’ve been quite handy. (Of course, hindsight is 20/20.)

Bottom line: The skill you need to develop if you want to live a happier, more satisfying professional and personal life is the ability to ask the “what ifs” that can see you through a blip in your day or a catastrophe. Indeed, this is one of the key characteristics shared by the best known and most successful professionals out there.

That said, please understand that not every Plan A warrants a Plan B. (Your top priorities, responsibilities, job tasks and so on are worthy of Plan B reflection.) Further, sometimes having a general idea of how you’d handle a problem with Plan A is enough of a Plan B to act quickly – with decisiveness – so you remain effective.

So, this week, challenge yourself to find a little time to pause and reflect on your plans – and then flex your brain muscle and prepare for success in spite of life – in all its messy, unpredictable and exciting glory!

“Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.” ~ John Lennon

How do you implement back-up plans in your work? We would love to hear your best methods in the comments below.

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A federal court has now blocked Biden's new student-loan repayment plan in full, prohibiting borrowers from getting cheaper payments and debt cancellation

• The 8th Circuit on Thursday blocked the SAVE student-loan repayment plan in full.
• This means debt cancellation and cheaper payments through the plan cannot be implemented. 
• This also reverses the 10th Circuit's decision that allowed some of SAVE's provisions to continue.

A major repayment plan for millions of student-loan borrowers is once again blocked.

On Thursday, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the SAVE plan, intended to lower borrowers' monthly payments and give many of them a shorter timeline for loan forgiveness, cannot be implemented as the legal process continues.

It follows a series of legal challenges to the plan. Earlier this year, two separate groups of GOP state attorneys general filed lawsuits to block the SAVE plan, and at the end of June, two federal courts placed preliminary injunctions on the plan .

Just days later, however, the 10th Circuit appeals court granted the Biden administration's request to stay one of the rulings, allowing provisions that were set to go into effect in July — including cheaper payments — to move forward.

Thursday's ruling from the 8th Circuit blocked all provisions of SAVE in a one-sentence ruling: "Appellants' emergency motion for an administrative stay prohibiting the appellees from implementing or acting pursuant to the Final Rule until this Court rules on the appellants' motion for an injunction pending appeal is granted."

An Education Department spokesperson told Business Insider, "We are assessing the impacts of this ruling and will be in touch directly with borrowers with any impacts that affect them."

Related stories

"Our Administration will continue to aggressively defend the SAVE Plan — which has been helping over 8 million borrowers access lower monthly payments, including 4.5 million borrowers who have had a zero dollar payment each month," the spokesperson said. "And, we won't stop fighting against Republican elected officials' efforts to raise costs on millions of their own constituents' student loan payments."

Thursday's ruling was in response to the lawsuit led by Missouri's attorney general. Kansas is leading the other lawsuit to block SAVE, which it has requested the Supreme Court take on. SCOTUS hasn't yet said whether it will.

But the Education Department recently filed a response to the Supreme Court detailing the steps the department and borrowers would be forced to take should the SAVE plan be blocked. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote that if the plan couldn't be carried out, the department must put borrowers on forbearance as they recalculate new payments.

"Many have already received bills that reflect the decrease in monthly payments to 5% of their discretionary income," she wrote. "Many would experience intense confusion when they are told that their payments must be recalculated and that they must be placed in forbearance -- which would delay any eventual loan forgiveness."

The back-and-forth rulings have already prompted payment delays and confusion among borrowers. After the 10th circuit allowed SAVE's June provisions to move forward, the Education Department moved to direct servicers to begin processing the new, lower payments for borrowers. The department also clarified at the time that because of the lawsuits, payments wouldn't become due until July or August.

That timeline is now in flux, and borrowers will once again be waiting for clarity on the status of their payments and what will happen to their SAVE benefits now that the plan is blocked.

Watch: Why student loans aren't canceled, and what Biden's going to do about it

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Project 2025 would overhaul the U.S. tax system. Here's how it could impact you.

By Aimee Picchi

Edited By Anne Marie Lee

Updated on: July 12, 2024 / 1:42 PM EDT / CBS News

Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for the next Republican president, is gaining attention for its proposals to overhaul the federal government. Among those changes: a major restructuring of the U.S. tax code. 

President Biden and Democrats have been citing Project 2025 in recent weeks as they seek to highlight what could be in store if former President Donald Trump wins at the polls in November and retakes the White House in January.  Many of the blueprint's proposals touch on economic matters that could impact millions of Americans, as well as social issues such as abortion and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, topics. 

Project 2025 , overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is spearheaded by two ex-Trump administration officials: project director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump who is now the project's associate director.

Trump: "I know nothing about Project 2025"

For his part, Trump has distanced himself from the blueprint, writing on Truth Social early Thursday that he isn't familiar with the plan. His campaign has proposed its own goals through " Agenda 47 ," which tends to focus on social and political issues such as homelessness and immigration rather than taxes.

"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it," Trump wrote  Thursday.

His pushback comes after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts opined in a podcast interview that the U.S. is "in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." 

According to Project 2025's website, its goal is to have "a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration."

A shift to two brackets

The tax proposals of Project 2025, if enacted, would likely affect every adult in the U.S. by tossing out the nation's long-standing system of multiple tax brackets, which is designed to help lower-income Americans pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes compared with middle- or high-income workers. 

Currently, there are seven tax brackets — 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37% — with each based on income thresholds. For instance, a married couple pays 10% in federal income tax on their first $23,200 of income, and then 12% on earnings from $23,201 to $94,300, and so on. Married couples need to earn over $487,450 this year to hit the top tax rate of 37%.

Project 2025 argues that the current tax system is too complicated and expensive for taxpayers to navigate. To remedy those problems, it proposes just two tax rates: a 15% flat tax for people earning up to about $168,000, and a 30% income tax for people earning above that, according to the document . It also proposes eliminating "most deductions, credits and exclusions," although the blueprint doesn't specify which ones would go and which would stay.

"The federal income tax system is progressive, and people who make more money pay a higher marginal tax rate than people who make less money," Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told CBS MoneyWatch. "Conservatives look at that, and they feel that that's unfair to the wealthy to ask them to pay a greater share of their income in taxes than lower income families."

The Project 2025 proposal "is a dramatic reform of how we fund our government, where we ask the wealthy to pitch in more than lower income families," he said. "This shifts taxes from the wealthy to the middle class, full stop."

Project 2025 didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

In a statement, the Heritage Foundation said it will ultimately be up to the next conservative president do decide which recommendations to implement, adding "As we've been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign." 

Project 2025's tax rates 

Millions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes under the Project 2025's proposals.

He estimated that a middle-class family with two children and an annual income of $100,000 would pay $2,600 in additional federal income tax if they faced a 15% flat tax on their income due to the loss of the 10% and 12% tax brackets. If the Child Tax Credit were also eliminated, they would pay an additional $6,600 compared with today's tax system, Duke said. 

By comparison, a married couple with two children and earnings of $5 million a year would enjoy a $325,000 tax cut, he estimated. 

"That 15% bracket is a very big deal in terms of raising taxes on middle-class families," Duke said. 

Millions of U.S. households earning less than $168,000 would likely face higher taxes with a 15% rate. Currently, the bottom half of American taxpayers, who earn less than $46,000 a year, pay an effective tax rate of 3.3%  — which reflects their income taxes after deductions, tax credits and other benefits. 

Among other tax and economic changes proposed by Project 2025: 

• Cutting the corporate tax rate to 18% from its current 21%, which was enacted in 2017's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Prior to the TCJA, the corporate tax rate stood at 35%.
• Reducing the capital gains tax to 15%. Currently, high-income earners pay a tax of 20% on their capital gains.
• Eliminating credits for green energy projects created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Considering the introduction of a U.S. consumption tax, such as a national sales tax. 
• Eliminating the Federal Reserve's mandate to maintain full employment in the labor market.

To be sure, overhauling the tax system would require lawmakers to approve changes to the tax code, which could be difficult if either the House or Senate is controlled by the opposing party. For instance, Trump was able to get his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by a Republican-led Congress, even though no Democrats voted in support of the measure. 

What does Trump say about taxes?

Trump hasn't yet proposed any concrete tax plans, but analysts expect that he would seek to extend the tax cuts enacted through the TCJA if he is reelected. Currently, many of the provisions of the TCJA, including lower tax brackets, are set to expire at the end of 2025. 

One likely scenario if Trump is reelected is that Republican lawmakers would extend the TJCA's tax cuts, while seeking to fund the reduction in tax revenue by repealing some of the clean energy and climate-related provisions in the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, according to an April report from Oxford Economics. Lawmakers could also seek to cut spending on social benefits to offset the tax cuts, the research firm added.

Trump has suggested a proposal to create a 10% tariff for all imports and a 60% tariff for Chinese imports that could raise enough money to eliminate the federal income tax. 

Tax experts also say the math doesn't work out because money raised from new tariffs would fall far short of replacing the more than $2 trillion in individual income taxes collected by the IRS each year. Consumers are also likely to pay more in higher costs for imported consumer goods and services with tariffs tacked onto them, experts note.

"A tariff is a consumption tax, and there is a throughline between [Project 2025's] tax reform and what Trump has talked about, getting rid of taxes in favor of a consumption tax," Duke noted. 

• Donald Trump

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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Business Continuity Plan: A Detailed Explanation

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategy for ensuring that critical business functions continue during and after a disaster. It outlines procedures to ensure critical operations continue during small and big disruptions. Explore this blog to learn more about BCP.

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Challenges and Crisis - This is the stern, inevitable duo that torments the corporate world. While small day-to-day challenges can be dealt with in a short amount of time, a big crisis descends without a warning and inflicts deeper wounds to businesses. The only defence against such scenarios is proactive preparedness, and nothing streamlines preparedness in the world of business quite like a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). 

BCP is essentially your steadfast compass guiding your organisation through the turbulent sea of unexpected disruptions. This blog explores the key components, benefits, and steps to creating an effective Business Continuity Plan. So read on and fortify your business for any eventuality.

Table of Contents

1) What is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

2) Importance of Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

3) Features of a Business Continuity Plan

4) Elements of a Business Continuity Plan

5) How to Create a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

6) Advantages of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

7) Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

8) Business Continuity Plan Template

9) Conclusion 

What is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?  

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) provides guidelines and procedures that your company can follow during and after a crisis. These plans encompass business processes, key assets and partners, human resource roles, and other critical information to sustain your brand's relationships with stakeholders.  

The aim is to address anything from minor disruptions to major threats such as fire, earthquake, flood or Cyberattacks. Preparing contingencies in advance for such scenarios can help your business remain operational during sudden or unavoidable disasters.  

Importance of Business Continuity Plan (BCP)  

Risks can be managed but complete elimination is impossible. This makes Business Continuity Planning (BCP) vital because, without it, an organisation faces downtime and various other issues that could harm its financial health. 

Especially in case of major disasters, the absence of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) could lead to permanent closure to the business due to irreversible financial damage. By considering the essential functions necessary for your business to operate, you can start to identify specific risks and plan for them within those functions. 

Features of a Business Continuity Plan  

While certain features of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will be specific to a business or industry, several components are common to almost any plan:  

1) People  

A BCP will define clear roles and responsibilities. These roles and responsibilities are not only for the crisis management leadership team but for any units responsible for implementing diverse aspects of the overarching plan.  

Some BCPs will also identify ‘essential personnel’, whose roles require them to report to work even during periods of elevated risk. 

2) Health and Safety Measures  

A robust Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will include criteria and guidelines that ensure the safety and health of everyone involved in the implementation and management of the plan. This includes employees, customers and partners. 

3) Technological Infrastructure  

Most modern BCPs will outline the role of Information Technology (IT) in ensuring that critical data, applications, and services remain available or are quickly restored after a disruption. This includes: 

a) Data backup and recovery tools 

b) Cloud computing infrastructure and services 

c) Remote work platforms 

4) Service Delivery  

Additionally, a BCP should detail which services are most critical and how they will continue to be delivered to employees, customers, partners, the public, and other stakeholders. 

Elements of a Business Continuity Plan  

While the execution process of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) may vary based on the nature of the crisis or industry, an ideal BCP should contain the following basic items: 

a) Initial data at the beginning of the plan, including important contact information. 

b) Revision management process that details change management procedures. 

c) Purpose and scope of the plan. 

d) Procedures on using the plan, including guidelines as to when the plan will be initiated. 

e) Policy information. 

f) Emergency response and management procedures. 

g) Step-by-step procedures along with checklists and flow diagrams. 

h) Glossary of terms used in the plan. 

i) Schedule for testing, reviewing and updating the plan.   

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How to Create a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?  

With the key elements of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in mind, it’s time to create a robust BCP. To achieve that, companies must follow the following steps: 

a) Business Impact Analysis (BIA) : in this step, the business will identify time-sensitive functions and the resources required for them. Usually, this phase entails prioritising different areas or departments in terms of how important they are to the operation. This confirms that your plan ultimately ensures the continuity of the most critical functions first. 

b) Recovery : In this portion, the organisation will determine and implement steps to restore vital business functions after the crisis. 

c) Organisation : This step necessitates the formation of a continuity team which will be responsible for managing disruptions and creating a response plan. 

d) Training : Even the most comprehensive BCP requires regular testing to ensure its effectiveness. This involves training employees about their roles and responsibilities during such scenarios and conducting trials of different plan components. For example, a short-term implementation of a remote work scenario can help identify issues and opportunities for improvement 

Additionally, companies may benefit from creating a checklist which includes: 

a) Emergency contact information  

b) Necessary resources for the continuity team 

c) Locations of backup data  

d) Miscellaneous essential personnel. 

Besides testing the continuity team, it’s also important to test the BCP itself multiple times to ensure it can handle diverse risk scenarios. This helps identify and eliminate any weaknesses in the plan. 

Looking to strengthen your business’ defences? Our ISO 22301 Certified Business Continuity Management is here to help. Register now!  

Advantages of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)  

With increasing frequency of natural disasters and data breaches, it’s not a matter of if, but when a disruptive event will take place. Business Continuity Plans (BCP) can help organisations address several key issues before disruptions happen: 

1) Unprepared Employees : By proactively creating plans and training employees, organisations ensure a safe and timely recovery. Identifying sensitive and critical functions in advance enables prompt execution of the plan during a crisis. 

2) Insurance Limitations : While insurance plans (Healthcare, vehicles, or equipment replacement) are fine, it can’t compensate for the loss of customers who might turn to competitors following damage to the company’s reputation. 

3) Investment in Continuity : Although developing a BCP involves fixed costs for training, wages, and equipment, it ensures that the company can resume operations quickly in the event of a disaster. 

Here’s how BCP can help different departments: 

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Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery  

The difference Business Continuity Plans and between Disaster Recovery Plans is that Disaster Recovery Plans are technical and primarily focus on recovering from failures. On the other hand, Business Continuity Plans manage relationships and operations during a crisis. Disaster recovery plans are essentially subsets of an overarching Business Continuity Plan. 

For example, in a larger crisis like a flooded building, a company might lose some IT services. Consequently, one or more Disaster Recovery instructions focused on restoring those IT services would be part of the broader Business Continuity Plan. 

Business Continuity Plan Template  

Once you have formulated the way to create a Business Continuity Plan, consider this as your ideal BCP template:  

Conclusion  

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is not just about survival; it's about a company thriving amidst adversity. We hope this blog helps you embrace the power of foresight as you navigate your organisation through a meticulously crafted Business Continuity Plan. 

Prepare your business for any crisis event with our Certified Business Continuity Management Professional (CBCMP) Course – Sign up now!  

Frequently Asked Questions

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is used for preventing and recovering business systems from potential threats, such as natural disasters or cyber-attacks. 

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) checklist is a document that comprehensively outlines the steps required to make sure the continuity of business operations during unexpected crisis situations.   

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India unveils 10 bln rupee venture capital fund for space sector

India will set up a 10 billion rupee ($119 million) venture capital fund to expand its space sector, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday, as the country sets its sights on a larger share of the global space market.