Strengthen Your Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) Plan

Backing up data is not usually a major priority for many SMB organizations, but it should be. Ransomware attacks have been steadily on the rise in the past five years, with even the White House warning businesses to prioritize adopting offline backup options as an essential part of their cybersecurity strategy.

Whether it’s ransomware, hardware failure, or user error, many businesses are simply unprepared for data loss, despite the well-known statistics on the effects and the staggering costs of downtime. In order for your business to successfully protect both your data and your customers, it is imperative to think beyond simple backups to the cloud or another server, and implement an effective Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) strategy. A good BDR strategy is essential in today’s data-centric climate, and should include a durable solution that protects your data from both external threats, human error, and natural disasters, while also ensuring efficient recovery so you are always ready to bounce back.

Back Up with Recovery in Mind

When it comes to discussing backups, it is important to consider recovery as well. After all, they are two sides on the same coin. The key to effective backups is to make them as if you will need to recover them one day—otherwise you are simply throwing money away.

For the importance of having a simple and effective BDR strategy, look no further than the Hancock Health ransomware attack. The hospital actually had backups of the data in place, but recovery would have taken days, maybe weeks—downtime which the hospital could not afford. In the end they chose to pay the ransom as it was just simplest option. This happens to countless businesses, where they spend the resources to effect backups but don’t consider the time and cost of recovery, drastically reducing the efficacy of backups.

Your backup strategy needs to be simple and effective, which means you should have a simple path to access your data when you need it, instead of having to roll the dice with cybercriminals or deal with tedious recovery times and efforts.

Key Recovery Targets

As part of your BDR strategy, you will need to consider recovery targets. The three key objectives to be achieved are RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective), and RLO (Recovery Level Objective).

RTO is an immensely important metric that determines how quickly you need to restore your system if it goes down, as it effectively asks: “How long is an acceptable downtime period before my costs become too much?” On the other hand, RPO helps you determine how often backups need to occur, as it asks: “How much data can I lose if something happens?”. For example, if make backups every hour and you determine your RPO to be two hours (i.e. you can lose two hours of data without much concern), you are in good shape.

RLO is a benchmark that indicates the granularity at which you will need to recover data, such as a file library, an application, or data clusters. An effective RLO requires very intricate plans to protect essential data sets of file libraries.

How Buffalo NAS Helps Achieve Effortless BDR

For businesses with tighter budgets, a BDR appliance can offer the perfect blend of functionality and affordability. A good BDR appliance solution will include powerful hardware with a myriad of flexible features that make the backup and recovery process simple and cost effective.

The TeraStation Network Attached Storage is a data storage and backup solution that helps you maintain an effective BDR plan without breaking your budget. The TeraStation WS IoT NAS can greatly help you achieve Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for businesses of any size while keeping your costs at a minimum. Our solution is built for the ‘S’ in ‘SMB’.

TeraStation 3020, 5020, and 7010 series NAS offer both on-premises data security while also offering offsite replication capability to protect against ransomware and other threats. The TeraStation provides automated backups for simple and hands-free data protection, and offers streamlined replication and recovery options to reduce downtime. You can integrate any popular cloud service into your backup strategy by enabling a hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud approach allows you to keep your most sensitive data secure by storing it on your on-premises NAS, and move your less sensitive data to the cloud. You can achieve the perfect balance between price, security, and control for your important data as you see fit.

The TeraStation can also utilize virtualization to restore a failed system. You can create entire virtual machines (VMs) on any hardware that supports them. By restoring virtual machines, you eliminate the need to restore or duplicate individual hardware devices—and having to contend with failures due to hardware dependencies or software reinstalls. Instead, you can recover to any hardware or run workloads on standby hardware to bypass downtime temporarily.

Buffalo TeraStation 3020, 5020, and 7010 units also utilize a snapshot feature: by creating a virtual copy of the data currently stored on the NAS that is merely a fracture of the actual data size, you can quickly restore from the last snapshot capture point and be on your way. The snapshot feature allows you to instantly create a virtual copy of the data currently stored in a shared folder or iSCSI volume on the TeraStation, and is a fast and efficient method to quickly back up and restore data at short intervals.

Data protection needs to be straightforward and reliable. Regardless of the business size, NAS data protection (and more importantly, recovery) needs to be fast and flexible in order to protect stored files and maintain uptime. Many competitor NAS devices offer inadequate ransomware protection in that should data become compromised, you would have to tediously restore the whole system from backup, which can create downtime that can cripple a business. Snapshot can be an invaluable tool in your arsenal to combat ransomware.

Buffalo Helps You Focus on Work with Peace of Mind

As cyberthreats grow more sophisticated, defense needs to evolve to keep your data safe. However, your BDR strategy doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. Whether it’s user error ransomware, having a BDR appliance solution that is cost-effective and offers powerful backup, recovery, and security features can go a long way in helping you navigate out of a sticky situation should disaster strike.

Buffalo’s acclaimed network attached storage is widely considered the most secure storage on the market, along with personal customer service and 24/7 North America-based support. With nuanced security features such as drive encryption and a closed system, as well as an adaptable array of backup features, Buffalo prides itself in providing flexible data storage solutions that offer the security, stability, and simplicity you need so you can manage your data with peace of mind. Responsible for many industry firsts and technology standards, Buffalo has four decades of networking and computer peripheral manufacturing and design experience.