March 31 is generally recognized as World Backup Day as you don’t want to be fooled on April 1 if you don’t have the data you need. This is very important with today’s threats to our data. Ransomware, accidental deletion, malicious administrators and more threats are constantly in play to make bad things happen to good data.
World Backup Day gives us an opportunity to re-assess what we are doing with our backups, and given the current conditions, I will offer a few practical tips to improve your backup implementation. Here are five tips:
Have some form of Ultra-Resilient backup storage
This could include offline, air-gapped or immutable media. The options are plenty here with Veeam Availability Suite v10. Whether you fancy tape, S3-immutable backups, offline disks or more, you can have a copy of data that can add additional resiliency to threats.
Live by the 3-2-1 rule
We have so much on the Veeam website about this way of thinking that you can surely find your way to more resiliency with the technologies you have and the results you want. The rule states to keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media with 1 copy off-site. Do better and have one as ultra-resilient and you are even more resilient.
Re-assess permissions with components and accounts
Worst practice: Using a privileged account for production applications and all parts of the backup infrastructure. Best practice: Implement components and roles with the required permissions and explicit accounts. See the Veeam Help Center for this documentation.
Keep backup infrastructure and applications updated
This helps in many areas, as some ransomware have exploited patched vulnerabilities. But updates also pave the way for the latest platform support and new capabilities. The operating systems, components and even the hardware involved are all good candidates to keep updated.
Lastly, and this sounds crazy, but
Make sure everything that needs to be backed up is!
This is a chance to fine-tune your environment and avoid any surprises. We’ve all been there. What we thought was development was in turn production, or maybe new production applications systems were added but not backed up. An easy way to address this is with the Veeam ONE Protected VMs Report. Flip this around and make sure your Office 365 data is backed up too. Check out the free Community Edition of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 if this is a gap in your backup strategy.
These five tips are a start, but World Backup Day is a reminder to ensure that what you implement will do what you ask when the need arises. And when that needs comes, we believe our products will deliver the simplicity, reliability and flexibility to build that trust. If you are in search of better backup, look no further than Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition or a free trial of the fully functional editions.
