TIME TO READ: 5 MINUTES
Chances are you agree with this statement:
“Keeping cloud backups of my company’s servers and important workstations is essential. It’s one of the most critical steps we take to manage business risk.”
These days most companies do have third-party cloud backups in place. But do they also have an active backup maintenance plan? Cloud backups need regular maintenance to make sure they can be restored at a moment’s notice.
Let’s talk about why backups require maintenance, and the best practices for performing it.
Why Do Backups Need Maintenance?
Unfortunately, backups don’t fix themselves (yet). To fulfill their role as a lifeline for your company, they need regular monitoring, tests, and sometimes a little manual remediation. In other words, maintenance.
Why prioritize backup maintenance? Because it combats threats to your Data.
Data file corruption is the biggest threat. Corruption can go unnoticed in untested backups, making them useless.
Even today, corruption can creep in from just about anywhere:
- Malware that can delete or overwrite parts of a file
- Physical damage to a storage device (e.g., dropped/scratched)
- Software glitches or crashes while saving a file
- Compression errors
- Improper shutdown
- Aging media, making it difficult to reconstruct old files
- De-synchronization between cloud and device
Next threat, infections . A data infection – like from ransomware – can destroy some or all parts of a backup file. You can (sometimes) fix this with remediation...if you catch it.
The third threat comes from Time itself. Each cloud backup service has its own
data retention period. For instance, one service keeps old backup files for 30 days, after which it deletes them. What if a critical document gets corrupted on a user’s computer...but nobody notices it until 3 months later?
You’re out of luck.
Finally, there’s regulatory compliance This isn’t a threat, but a cautionary tale. Depending on your business’ industry/location/data types, you may need to adhere to certain regulations. Which includes keeping backups
safe & secure.
- Industry Regulations: Does your industry require you to protect your users’ personal and financial data? Your backups hold copies of that data and need regular security checks.
- Privacy Mandates: GDPR and HIPAA both want backups secured and verified regularly.
- SOX Compliance: Publicly traded companies must demonstrate SOX compliance and maintain cloud backups for 90 days. Including strict access controls and audit log documentation.
Fight Data Loss with Managed Backups
Managed Backups is a service that covers backup maintenance. A third party takes responsibility for the daily monitoring, maintenance, and testing of your cloud backups. PlanetMagpie does provide Managed Backups to all customers who want it.
What services come with Managed Backups?
- BACKUP MONITORING – To detect backup infections and file corruptions.
- Sometimes backup software flags a file as infected or corrupt. When it does, the software will exclude it from its backups.
- These files need repair, but the software can’t do it. So, our technicians step in to fix them.
- Infected – Could signify malware. Run antivirus, then re-add clean file to backup.
- Corrupt – Test corrupt file to see if it’s still viable. If not, use older backups to source a clean file version and replace.
- FILE TESTING – Restoring a file (or group of files) from your backup to a regular computer, to verify it still works. Done for server and workstation backups.
- SECURITY CHECKS – For spotting/blocking unauthorized access to backups.
- RECOVERY TEST RUNS – A full restore of a server/workstation’s backup to validate that the backup can restore the OS and its data. Done annually.
- STANDBY TESTING – Testing to verify standby images, a unique service provided by PlanetMagpie.
- ‘Live’ standby image services for server backups help significantly reduce downtime if a disaster occurs.
- Standby images are virtual machine copies of servers, kept up to date with new backup data, that you can use as a quick replacement.
- Say one of your servers suffers hardware failure. With a standby image, you can activate a new ‘temporary’ server to take the dead server’s place in minutes. While it runs, you can set up a permanent replacement server.
Make Sure All Your Backups Remain Viable – So You Can Restore with Confidence
Backups are there to save you when disaster strikes.
To do that, to always be reliable, backups need regular maintenance. It takes a little effort, but the payoff is huge.
Managed Backups will keep you in business.
Need a backups check? Contact our team at woof@planetmagpie.com!