Executive Considerations for Backup

Corporate data is often considered one of an enterprise’s most critical assets. Ensuring that it is properly backed up can help prevent unexpected data loss. Any number of catastrophic events can cause data loss, including hardware failure, misconfiguration, malware, errant code or SQL queries, or even disgruntled employees. Secure data backup is essential as insurance against these sorts of occurrences.

Key Concepts

Executives, application leaders, and risk managers, among others, should consider a number of factors in determining an efficient, cost-effective backup strategy. These should include:

Point-in-time backup and recovery. Typically applications back up periodically, say, once per hour or once per day, creating what is called point-in-time backups. Organizations should consider how many of these backups to maintain. For example, one approach to recovering from a ransomware attack is to restore a system from a time prior to when the infection occurred.

Recovery time objective (RTO). The RTO represents the maximum amount of time required to restore all data and bring affected systems back online. For example, business-critical systems may require an RTO in minutes or less.