What happens to your company’s data when there are management system failures, when information is accidentally or intentionally deleted, or when servers crash? The backup policy serves to ensure that your IT team is prepared to react if data is affected by any type of incident.
Therefore, we will indicate the role of the backup policy in the company’s contingency plans and show how the IT manager can define it using 5 questions. Check it out!
The Role of the Backup Policy in IT Governance
The IT governance defines processes, methodologies, responsibilities, and tools necessary to align the decisions of the technology team with business needs.
In addition to planning how employees, customers, and suppliers will be supported daily through the use of technological resources, governance aims to mitigate risks and increase the productivity of all users.
The backup policy needs to be defined precisely within the risk mitigation strategy. After all, its function is to ensure the availability of backup copies when they are needed.
The 5 Questions for Defining a Good Backup Policy
1. What data needs to be backed up?
Not all data has the same importance for the company. For example, the administrative area has the legal obligation to keep tax collection receipts for at least 5 years to avoid fines. Other documents and records may require less time before disposal.
Therefore, evaluate with the various sectors of the company which documents exist, their importance, and the retention period each should have. Analyze the frequency with which new files in that category arise and map the impacts of losing them.
2. Where can they be backed up?
In the cloud, on tape, on disk, or on an IT asset redundancy server? You must specify the device according to the importance of the data and the need for its rapid restoration in case of core system downtime. Keep in mind that recovering backups made on physical media may take longer than cloud backups, for example.
3. What is the backup routine?
Some companies use a daily routine of incremental backups, meaning they only copy files that have changed since the last copy. Others use shorter periods depending on the amount of files created or handled in their departments.
The routine should be established based on the volume of important files used by your employees in performing their work.
4. Who executes the backup and restorations?
The IT team can execute the complete routine or use software to automate the backup, remaining responsible only for restorations. Another option is to hire an outsourced service to manage this process.
Normally, an outsourced company can automate processes, monitor whether backup routines are running according to policy definitions, and optimize the storage space consumption required.
Here it is worth considering the cost-benefit ratio and the agility to restore data when necessary.
5. What are the costs?
The last part of the plan is to size the files to be copied, the projected Gigabyte growth rate for document copies, and the devices needed to support the backup. After that, outline the financial costs of the strategy.
Almost always, the cost of maintaining the backup is infinitely lower than the expenses caused by the impact of losing the files.
Conclusion
Defining a backup policy should be one of the first tasks of IT governance. After all, backups are resources that support other strategies, such as Disaster Recovery. Putting this strategy into action will be much simpler and more effective after the IT area or a partner has documented which data, where, how, and who executes your company’s backup.
Creating a backup policy can be laborious and quite time-consuming, as it requires aligning IT professionals with the needs of other areas of the company. Want to discover a simpler and faster way to perform this and other tasks? Check out this post and learn how IT outsourcing helps your company overcome challenges!
