What’s Backup and Disaster Recovery, and Do I Need to Worry About It?

Nowadays, businesses need to be prepared for almost every circumstance. You may have heard the term “BDR” used to describe a method of attaining this level of preparation. We wanted to discuss this term in more depth, covering what it refers to and what you need to do to protect your business should BDR be right for you.

Spoiler alert: it very much is.

“BDR” is Shorthand for Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and Disaster Recovery is more or less what it sounds like… a strategy that accounts for your data’s survival and determines how best to resume your operations after some disaster strikes. Backup refers to your business having spare copies of its data to fall back on should something happen to its operational copy due to some attack or mishap. Disaster recovery focuses on what needs to be done after any kind of catastrophe—natural or man-made—impacts a business so that an acceptable level of operations can be resumed as quickly as possible to minimize the downtime that impacts you.

Combining these two preparations into a single strategy helps you better protect your business from prolonged interruptions and their consequences.

Without this guardrail, any disaster could potentially take down a business. 

BDR is Critical for Any Business

Whatever the inciting incident, you could see serious penalties to your finances and your reputation in your community, and plenty of potential incidents could incite data loss. A cyberattack is one example, but so are system crashes, human error, weather-induced power surges, or blackouts.

Whatever the case, would you be able to trust a business that didn’t have precautions to protect its resources fully? Would you want to work with a business that may have allowed your data to be stolen?

Probably not… and unfortunately, your clients, customers, and patrons won’t either.

Being prepared with a carefully considered and implemented BDR strategy helps you avoid these impacts by helping you get your business back on track as quickly as possible.

What Must Be Involved in Your BDR Strategy?

Like most strategies, a proper backup and disaster recovery strategy relies on a few elements working together to ensure that everything is adequately addressed. 

First of all, you need to know that your data is being backed up regularly and that these backups abide by the 3-2-1 Backup Rule:

• At least three copies of your data exist at any given time
• These copies exist on at least two different storage mediums
• At least one copy is kept in offsite storage, ideally the cloud

Once you have attended to your backups, you need to confirm that they work as intended and that the rest of your disaster recovery planning is effective. Testing them by running your team through simulated disasters to check their readiness and trying to operate off your backups alone helps you accomplish this, as it shows you where more work needs to be done.

Whatever Your Business Does, Whatever Size, BDR is Critical

Considering how critical a business’ data is to its success, having a strategy to protect it seems like a no-brainer. However, while we’ve outlined the basic principles here, there’s much more your business needs to do to ensure the backup and disaster recovery strategy you’ve implemented will work effectively. 

That said, you don’t need to go about it single-handedly… we’re here to help.

Reach out to us at 607.433.2200 to find out more about how Directive can assist you with your data backup and disaster recovery preparedness, your overall business continuity, and your essential technology management and maintenance!