Life in IT is always exciting, you’ve seen the movies with all these technical folks in huge rooms with screens everywhere, lights flashing and people shouting as they track down some criminal mastermind……I mean it’s exactly like that isn’t it? No, really just no, it is NOTHING like that!

Yawn….

What it is like though, for most at least, is making sure that systems are working which involves checking system logs and hardware logs. Its about helping users to get the information they need or fixing issues they’re having – for the most part it is pretty boring but boring is good, right? One of the key assets of any modern business is the data it holds about itself, it’s clients or it’s employees – without this they’re pretty much dead in the water.

Story time 🙂

I mean imagine this for a moment, you came into work tomorrow and all of the files that you use to do your job were not available on the system. You contact IT and they say, yep there was a server crash and they’re working to get everything back up and running. First thought, ok I’ll go make a coffee and kill some time until they have it back up and running. So off you head to the kettle, making a detour on route to speak to a friend in another department. As you head over to the kettle you notice that there’s a lot more people congregated there than normal, which makes sense as nobody can work at the moment. By the time you’ve made your coffee and head back to your desk an hour has passed so you drop another call into IT who confirm they’re still working on it with no ETA. You decide to do some filing and soon it’s lunch so you head out and figure you’ll follow up with IT when you get back. Now you’re back from lunch so another call into IT, a full 4 hours since your first call, and they confirm they’re still working on it and trying now to restore from backups. The rest of the day, along with your 10 colleagues, is spent filling time while IT get things working. You head home hoping that everything is working in the morning but like most things powered by “hope”, it is not meant to be. The following morning you arrive at work to be told that everything is gone, none of the servers are operable and all of the backups are unusable so everything has been sent off to a data recovery firm, which will take a couple weeks, in the hope they can get something back – now what do you do?

The lesson

This may seem a little extreme but it’s a lot more common than you would expect. As we rely on IT systems to operate our businesses, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is a crucial part of any business plan today. Depending on your individual needs will depend on what level you will need to work towards but in its simplest form your business should be backing up it’s data at least once per day. This would include files that you work on, which could be on a server/NAS locally or on cloud storage such as SharePoint Online/Dropbox/Google Drive etc (yep these needs backing up). It would also include any other locations which hold your business information such as Microsoft 365, G Suite or other email systems (these too). As more accounting systems move online (Xero, Sage Online, etc) you should also do “due diligence” and ensure that backups of this data are taken daily as well – with these providers often they provide this as part of their service but best to check.

Most good quality backup systems do require additional investment (yep the dreaded moolah) but in many ways they are best thought of as insurance – because they day it is needed you will be glad you made that investment I promise. Whatever system you decide on make sure you follow these simple steps:

• Document it – it should be obvious how it works and where the data is (this is a big one)
• Test it
• Then test it again
• Finally, test it again (I know but it’s really important)

A backup is only as good as the last restoration that you perform regardless of what the backup logs tell you. For all of our managed clients, we check the backup results daily using our management software. Then, weekly, we will manually check the backup logs to verify that the results are being accurately recorded. Finally, once a month we will restore a random block of data from a random backup from the previous 30 days to ensure it usable. For our largest clients who have DR (disaster recovery) in place, we will perform quarterly or bi-annual DR tests where we “spin up” their entire systems in a test environment to verify it is usable.

It is additional work, beyond investing in the software/hardware, but its really important to know that whatever solution you have in place will be ready to go when you need it.

Summary

Right, if you have gotten this far then, quite frankly, you either are really interested or just a gluten for punishment, either way you deserve a medal!

Seriously though, if you have a solution in place and you are not sure when it was last tested then go and test it (or get your IT people to do it). If it has been tested, you are doing better than most! However, if that hasn’t taken place in the last 30 days then go and get it tested again and keep testing it every 30 days. Make sure that it is well documented how backups are taken, how often they’re taken, where the data goes, what encryption keys are used, what access credentials are needed to retrieve the data and where any offsite backups are stored.

When you leave your home in the morning you don’t leave the doors and windows unlocked so anyone can get it, this information is equally important to your business so protect it, protect it well and hope whatever backup solution you have in place is never needed but take comfort from the fact it’s ready should it be.