Coleman Technologies Blog

As your business has grown, have you fallen into the tech trap of DIY IT solutions? While you might have started with just a handful of employees, the infrastructure you’ve built is no longer sustainable or reliable. You need professional help if you want your business to stay competitive, and we have just the thing for you.

Building a gingerbread house is a perennial tradition in many, many households. Those with experience know that precise, careful preparation leads to a successful, long-lasting final product, while rushing and cutting corners usually leave you with a crumbling, fragile mess.

Much of the same can be said of your business’ data. This essential operational resource is terrifyingly susceptible to a litany of threats and issues that could easily bring your processes tumbling down… hence, why the 3-2-1 Backup Rule is a core element of successful business continuity.

Let’s take a moment to consider the recipe for a reliable, disaster-proof backup, and how it aligns with the process of making a gingerbread house.

Remember tape backup? For some SMBs who have moved on, this form of data backup is a clunky and frustrating relic of the past. But if you aren’t remembering it and are instead still dealing with it, you might be experiencing some operational frustrations of your own. Today, we want to cover a better solution—one that takes the unpredictability out of business continuity.

It is remarkable how much more capacity our data storage tools have than they had upon their initial invention, and how much data we’ve amassed in that time. The first-ever commercial hard drive was the size of two refrigerators, and held a mere five megabytes of data. For context, that’s about five photographs. Today, hard drives hold exponentially more data, and it is critical that you are doing everything you can to protect this data from any circumstance, from fire, severe weather, or cyberattack.

So, are you? Too many business owners aren’t sure… but there’s a way you can be. 

What would you do if your entire infrastructure were impacted by ransomware all at once? Do you have a contingency in place to address this risk, or are you going to “wing it” in the face of such a threat? The smart answer is that you’ll be prepared, and a data backup and disaster recovery solution (or BDR) plan will help you do just that.

You know your business needs data backup, but do you understand why? Simply put, your business is at risk of total annihilation if it doesn’t have a plan in place to recover lost data, and you don’t want that impending doom hanging over your head. If you’re wondering where to get started, here are three types of data that you should absolutely prioritize with your backups.

That said, you want to back up all data if you can, but these are three that we think are especially important to consider.

You’ve probably heard us talk about the importance of backing up data for business owners, managers, and even everyday workers. This month, we’re focusing on incremental backups and why they’re a great choice for small businesses looking to protect their data.

Business can get messy, particularly when variables outside your control are involved, which could spell doom for your organization. We’re talking, of course, about instances where your organization might be under a particularly large threat—instances where your data is at risk, which could jeopardize your future. Thankfully, there are options to mitigate this risk.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) are incredibly important elements of any successful business, as without them, you’re just one disaster away from a world-shattering wake-up call. We take a strategic approach to data backup and disaster recovery that considers your daily data backup needs while recognizing its long-term benefits. Let’s discuss how you can ensure that your business can use BDR to survive any potential threat the world throws at it.

World Backup Day, observed on March 31st annually, serves as a designated occasion to underscore the critical importance of regular data backups for ensuring data continuity. Although this day effectively highlights a fundamental best practice, we firmly advocate for a continuous commitment to maintaining and safeguarding backups rather than confining such awareness to a single day.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery are essential components of any modern business. As businesses become increasingly reliant on digital data, it's essential to have strategies in place to ensure that your data is safe and secure in the event of a disaster. Let’s cover the key components of an effective Disaster Recovery strategy to ensure the safety of your business' data backup. Read on to learn more about Disaster Recovery strategies and how to best protect your business data.

The modern business technology market is filled with exciting innovations, but one area that doesn't quite capture the imagination is data backup. Perhaps backup is not the most thrilling topic, but nevertheless, the growing demand for enhanced data security and redundancy in businesses is driving developers to push the boundaries of the technology, creating more advanced features to meet the growing demand for redundancy. Today, we take a look at three intriguing features of these emerging data backup solutions.

Data is the lifeblood of a business. In the event of unforeseen circumstances such as hardware failure, malware attacks, or human error, having a well-designed backup and data recovery strategy in place becomes paramount. Today, we try and guide you through the process of creating a robust backup and data recovery strategy, ensuring the safety and accessibility of your data.

Multi-factor authentication is great when it works, but when it doesn’t, it can leave you in a pretty difficult situation. After all, what happens when all of a sudden, you cannot access your secondary authentication methods? We’re here to help you bypass this particularly challenging and frustrating scenario.

The Importance of Testing Data Backup and Recovery Systems

Data backup protects a business from catastrophic data loss resulting from hardware failures, natural disasters, cybersecurity attacks, system outages, or network disruptions. Backing up data involves replicating it and storing it in different places. Such as the cloud, backup servers, and dedicated backup devices. This way, you can recover your data and information from a previous state and time in case of system outages. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of data backup are reduced drastically when you do not test them regularly and routinely. Data backup and recovery testing is the process of assessing the effectiveness of the systems, procedures, and methods that a company uses to replicate, store, and retrieve data in times of need.

Why Do You Need Data Backup?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Your business is constantly under threat. You may not realize it because you’ve been fortunate enough not to have any threat be bad enough where your operational and financial data is actively at risk. That may not always be the case, however. Consider how important your data is and think about all the things that could happen where you would have to deal with data loss. Situations that stem from natural disasters, scams and hackers, hardware failure, and human error can all trigger data loss. That’s a lot of variables to cover to keep hoping that nothing will happen. 

Using BDR

If you want data redundancy for your business in the information age, you need to get a BDR. Not only is your data backed up locally, it is also pushed to the cloud. Having data on site is great if you need to quickly restore something, or if your server crashes and you need a substitute server, while cloud backup is great for protecting the data in case of a major disaster that knocks out your onsite hardware. 

Protect Your Backup

Your business’ backup can be viewed as an insurance policy, but if it isn’t secured, it could be just another piece of a string of errors that takes your business down. In order for your backup to be a reliable contingency, you need to protect it. In order to do that, we suggest using the 3-2-1 rule as a base. That is: three copies of your data, with two being stored and attached to your network, and one saved offsite. 

A techy colleague of mine was taking advantage of a rainy weekend to update his internal infrastructure. For the sake of our story, we’ll call him Bobby. Bobby was migrating his entire server over to brand new hardware on a new rack. Without getting too technical, his server contained several virtual servers running in tandem, controlling his overall network, storing his data, and running his line of business applications. In other words, it was critical to his business. If it were to go down, his employees would be nearly crippled.

Data loss can happen a few different ways. Malware can cause irreversible data loss, and ransomware can cause reversible data loss, provided you pony up the ransom to hackers. Your end-users can mistakenly cause data loss by overwriting or deleting data, but a disgruntled employee could do even more damage intentionally. Your data is stored on delicate, mechanical devices that are extremely sensitive to shock and damage. Hard drives don’t last forever and will eventually fail, so if your data is only stored in one place, it’s just a matter of time.