Security guards and FDIC representatives open a Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) branch for customers at SVB’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on March 13, 2023. — © AFP
The business landscape is becoming more data-driven. While huge benefits can be gained from analysis and data analytics, there are downsides. These downside includes the risk of data loss. Reasons for data loss include cyberattacks, human error, or natural disasters. The solution to this is regularly and robustly backing-up data.
Digital Journal hears from two industry experts about the importance of data back-ups and the types of sound strategies needed to ensure data back-ups are correctly executed.
Rob Price, Director, who is Field Security Office at Snow Software (a technology intelligence company) states that data security is essential in the turbulent world. Here he notes: “Banking collapse, volatile economies, pandemics and cybercrime don’t change the fundamentals – data is the lifeblood of every organization and needs to be protected as such.”
In terms of appropriate measures, Price recommends: “Companies need to adhere to the law, govern data accordingly and have a recovery plan in place. Backups represent the last line of defense for everything from fat fingers to state-sponsored attacks. The key, as ever, is to treat information assets according to their importance to your business and manage risk accordingly.”
Also setting out the importance of data back-ups is Jason Konzak, SVP, Professional Services at Flexential (a data center colocation, cloud and connectivity provider).
Konzak approaching the issue from the cybersecurity perspective: “Ransomware thieves are swarming the Internet – and their success reflects the industry’s continued inability to implement appropriate preventative and recovery measures.”
One of the protective measures is data security, which Konzak observes: “Without proper backups and incident response plans, businesses are unable to recover data effectively and efficiently, putting long term business success on the line. In 2023, I urge leaders to make robust data protection a priority for their IT organizations.”
Acknowledging the data filing often gets forgotten about, Konzak urges: “Given IT admin work can quickly fall to the bottom of to-do lists, I suggest directly assigning responsibility to employees for maintaining and testing the backup strategy.”
This means backing-up with sufficient regularity, says Konzak. He states: “On a daily basis, an assigned employee should manually review backup and DR job successes, and failures.”
He further recommends: “Failed jobs need to be tracked as incidents and corrected so they do not become persistent gaps in protected data. Similarly, designated team members should test backups and DR solutions, document the results not only of success and failure, but also document the expected recovery time and recovery points (RTO and RPO).”
Konzak sums up, noting: “The results of these tests must be shared with organizational leadership so everyone can be on the same page about the ability of IT to protect critical data and keep business operations running.”