Business Continuity

What’s your plan if the cloud-based app you rely on decides to charge you 10x? Or shuts down? Do you have backups of your data that you control and have verified? Are you vulnerable to ransomware attacks?

This article is not about security. This article is about what happens when security fails, when employees make mistakes, when hardware fails, when cloud providers or legacy software vendors shut down or start trying to extract value from you because you’re locked into their platform, when your office burns down, when hackers lock your data to ransom it back to you. Every business should have a business continuity plan, and every business continuity plan should consider disaster recovery.

You’ve probably heard about ransomware attacks where the victim’s data is encrypted to lock them out of it and the attacker demands cryptocurrency to provide the key to unlock it. How effective would such an attack be if you had multiple copies of your data that could be easily restored?

You’ve probably also heard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. Having the data is a big piece of the puzzle, but you also need confidence in your ability to restore it. You need to test restoring from your backups so you know without a doubt that they work. And in today’s threat environment you must keep at least one copy air gapped–not connected to any network–so it stays out of reach of remote attackers.

If your backups run once a day, how will you recover the data created after the last backup? Maybe that wouldn’t be a big deal—maybe you can just hold onto the previous day’s notes. Maybe it would be catastrophic and you should increase the frequency of your backups. The important thing is to think it through.

If you’ve thought all this through and you have a solid disaster recovery plan that meets your recovery time needs, awesome! You are in control of your data. If the cloud app your business relies on shuts down or starts charging too much, you have options. If a competitor exists they’ll often have import tools available. If not companies like Eddys are here to help.