Disaster Recovery Plan
Boom! Your house blows up and you lost your computer as well as all the files stored on it. Good thing you backed up your files on that external USB hard drive, but wait it’s now in 6 pieces. The likely hood of your house blowing up is slim, the likely hood of your computer and external hard drive crashing as the same time is even slimmer. Having a backup plan to your backup is a good idea and can save you hours of valuable time and money.
What smart companies have done for their disaster recovery plan is not only store their data to a secondary storage device, but also on a third device. The third storage device will then be transported to a safe location that is a minimum of 30 miles away. Backup solution companies actually drive to the customer’s location to sign, pickup, and safely bring their backup to their facilities. There has to be trust to hand over your customers personal information and/or the company’s bank records to a “Truck Driver”. Eventually this truck driver brings your backup to another person you’ve never met before.
Any sensitive company data that has to travel outside the building has to be encrypted. Encrypting the data ensures that the files are garbage until you Decrypt them back to normal. How secure is your encrypted data? Well it depends on what type of encryption you are using. Some encryption software only use a password to decrypt your files, so it depends on how complicated your password is. The longer and the more random characters you use the more difficult it is to crack. Other types like symmetric key encryption encrypts the data twice, once with its key and the second with the receiving computer’s key. Which ever way you send it, it will be secure. The minimum encryption you should consider is 128 bit, mostly popular is the 256 bit encryption. Even with a 128 bit encryption there are 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities. You use encryption everyday when you log in to do your online banking. Notice the HTTPS in the address bar, the S stands for Secure, so now you’ll know your information is being encrypted when its sent.
Companies have been saving tons of money by using different types of disaster recovery strategies. One of the strategies is to cut out the middle man (Truck Driver) and send your data securely over the Internet. Now, most of you reading this are starting to twitch from the idea of sending your precious files over the Internet. It’s fine, it will eventually get there once China is done making a copy of all your file. Seriously though, with encryption and a good plan your files will be safely and securely backed. Having a plan is important in order to have a successful backup. Everything needs to be considered the right schedule, directory structure, recovery plan, and bandwidth usage to name the least. Support Visions is a local IT Solutions company in Rhode Island that will sit down with you and your team, to ensure backup recovery solution is properly setup.