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Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

27th Jul 2016
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One of the most common areas that we find small and medium businesses tend to overlook is backing up their data. After all, why worry? The systems are running fine, as always.

The fact is that because many companies have never been hit with a situation where they have ever needed to revert to back-ups it’s not something that comes to the forefront of their thoughts.

“A recent government survey of UK businesses showed that 82% of finance directors understood the importance of taking adequate backups, yet only 17% knew what their own disaster recovery procedures were”

I would hazard that even less know how long the disaster recovery process would take and how much data would be salvaged.

Good disaster recovery planning is vital and with a well managed Cloud solution you will have the peace of mind that every evening a complete snapshot of your accounting data is captured which can be restored completely without difficulty.

Unlike in a traditional network a well managed virtual or cloud environment should take entire snapshots of the hosted data at a binary level, not copying and pasting files to a location in a traditional sense. These virtual snapshots can then be redeployed as a whole or as individual files and folders as and when required.

On top of this snapshot Cloud users, depending on the level of access granted, may also have access to their local drives where backups taken from an accounting package backup routine can be saved. It is also ideal for storing word or excel documents for local use in environments where internet connection may not be available – in a plane for instance? When you are back on line the data can simply be copied backup up to the Cloud and it instantly becomes part of the next backup.

In the unlikely event of a ransomware attack such as CryptoLocker, a well managed system should simply be able to reset to the moment prior to the attack. In a traditional network there would be potential for new hardware to be installed and the cost/time of restoring the software from tapes or backup systems.

The key point to note here is "well managed" systems. Unfortuantely many systems are not "well managed" and many people have never questioned the company that host their data to actually prove their ability to restore and how long that process is likely to take. When questioned the majority of my clients said that backing up and disaster recovery was the remit of the IT department and that they had everything in hand. When the relevant IT dept was pressed for information such as what part of the accounting package they were backing up, it became evident very quickly that the procedures had never been discusssed between departments, let alone tested.

We recently ran a series of Disaster Recovery days at some of our Government based clients which exposed various levels of misinformation or assumption, that meant that in the event of  a disaster, data would not be restorable. The client in question then had a ransomwear attack and based on the risk assessments that we had carried out together, they were able to easily restore to a point that meant the minimum re-enty of data was required.

The golden rules should always be:

*Question everyone in the process - do not assume your IT department or third party provider are "handling it"

*Seek the help/expertise of your accountancy software support advisers to find out what is vital and what is not in the case of a restore

*Test the internal DR procedures regularly - the time taken to test policy will save you in the long run

On the whole we find that well managed cloud environments make backing up a very simple process and it is often the nuances in certain accounts packages that people miss, build that relationship with your software dealer or reseller, as they will know the do's and dont's for that particular software, getting it wrong could be disastrous.

  

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