Working from home – Why robust backup and disaster recovery procedures are essential

If the laptop of an employee working from home suffers from a malicious attack such as a virus, malware or ransomware, a hardware or software failure or an unplanned event, important files and data may be corrupted and irretrievably lost. This could cause serious disruption to business activities.

Maintaining key information

With many people currently work remotely, laptops and mobile devices are being used to access, update and edit business-critical data and documents. Are employees saving important files and data to the remote device they are working on – as opposed to a networked server – and if so are the files/data being backed up?

A robust backup and disaster recovery procedure should be considered essential for small and medium-sized companies when an unexpected event occurs.

Restore process

Data restore is the process of copying files from a backup location, such as the cloud or secure network attached storage, to the original location when data is lost or corrupted. Businesses need to consider the importance of the restore process –  this should take priority over backup procedures.

If an unexpected event occurs, the ability to get data back quickly is key – data restoration and recovery that takes many hours or even days will not help your business. We’ve heard stories recently of a company taking 2 weeks to recover from a ransomware attack, time businesses can currently ill afford to lose in the current climate.

Data Recovery

The processes and procedures involved in data restore/recovery can and will depend on the software tools or recovery package that is used.

A viable and convenient backup solution for remote employees is to use a fully automated cloud-based backup and recovery system. All data on remote laptops and devices is migrated automatically to a cloud server. Data on the cloud server will be synced automatically to the business data centres. In this way the data will not be lost, if the end device fails or is no longer available.

Review backup and restore procedures

The current social and business circumstances strongly suggest that now is a good time for businesses to review backup, and more importantly restore procedures. Ensuring reliable, resilient restore and backup measures are in place is essential to maintain the integrity of business activities and essential corporate data at all times.