Importance Of Backups In Cybersecurity.
Only those who have lost important data know the importance of having a backup, the so-called Backup. Often, they are lost due to system failures, formatting, files deleted by accident or even the misfortune of a machine breaking knows the importance.
For a company, data loss can mean much more than frustration, but huge losses. To know how to protect your data well, learn a little more about Backup and how to use it properly.
Table of Contents
What is Backup?
Can you imagine losing all your financial records, customer database or even your inventory releases? That would generate a lot of headache! The good news is that the automation of Backups significantly minimizes these risks.
Backup is considered to be any backup, whether made on another device, such as external hard drives, flash drives or in the cloud. The purpose of Backup is data recovery to restore information in case of loss of original files, or in case of operational accidents with equipment.
For this reason, it is recommended that we make recurring backups both in the professional environment and in our personal files (computer documents, cell phone photos, among others).
How important is Backup for business?
The importance of Backup lies in protecting against the risk of data and information loss. This importance increases in proportion to the value of the information to be protected. Thus, Backups become much more relevant in companies that work with sensitive data and information, such as bank details and personal customer data.
Currently, performing backups is a much simpler and more accessible activity, due to the diversity of resources that technology makes available. In this regard, the strategy of centralizing Backups in a single environment can bring many advantages to your business, as access to backups becomes more agile, optimizing restoration time in emergency cases.
Another important factor to consider is backup protection. Taking into account the growing cases of cyber attacks and the new LGPD (General Data Protection Law), which comes into force in 2020, protecting saved data with resources such as encryption or Blockchain are very important strategies.
How to automate Backup processes and increase security?
Manual Backup always offers more risks, as it is subject to various human errors, such as forgetfulness, improper storage or even insufficient technical knowledge. In addition, it takes a lot of time and reduces operational productivity.
Therefore, best practices recommend automating Backups, so that they occur on a recurring basis, respecting the specifics and rules of your business.
There are several Backup automation tools or software that are useful on the market, which offer, in addition to the programming of copies, data encryption, providing greater transparency and security for you to entrust your data to a system.
How Cloud Backup works
In recent years, using the Cloud for Backups, Recovery and Restore has become more secure, reliable and cost-effective. It reduces the risk of data loss, hardware costs and the physical space needed to store this information.
Cloud Backup proposes the automation of backup routines. To use this method, you must first make a diagnosis that points out the storage space that will be needed, as this is what cloud contracts take into account.
For home use, the most used cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Onedrive. For companies, more sophisticated services are needed such as Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, among others, which automate Backup.
Depending on the backup system used, the data will be automatically stored and protected in the cloud and can be recovered whenever necessary.
Full, Incremental and Differential Backups
To identify which method is best for your company, you need to evaluate the backup policy you have chosen to implement. Each methodology has its specific advantages, and you should consider which are the most important for the type of data and information you are dealing with and for your business model.
There are basically three methodologies for storing backups, Full, Incremental and Differential. Let’s talk a little about each of them.
Full Backup
It is the simplest and most common to be used, it consists of creating a complete copy of the data. All your company files are updated, not just new or modified ones. This methodology has the advantage of always having a complete copy of all your business data, allowing the full recovery of files in an agile way. The downside here is that it takes a lot more time to do and a lot more storage capacity.
Incremental Backup
This is the type of backup recommended for companies that have a large volume of data. It is usually performed after a Full Backup, saving only new or changed files. It is a method that allows faster creation of backup copies, taking much less time than the Full Backup. Its disadvantage is that to restore the system it needs to recover the complete data first and then the incremental ones and only then carry out the restoration of the files, taking longer.
Differential Backup
This method is very similar to Incremental in that it also creates a copy of changed files. The difference here is that it makes a copy since the Full Backup of everything that has changed since then. Thus, it stores more data than incremental and requires more space and time to perform. Its advantage is that to restore files it does it faster as it uses the last full backup as a reference. This method is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses because of the cost of storing the data.
In short, it is clear the importance of an adequate backup method established with the business management system, after all, some data is very valuable and losing them can cause a lot of damage and even legal complications.
