Backup Policies
Backup policies are a crucial component in an organization or individual?s overall disaster recovery planning and strategic implementation. As a result backup policies, processes, procedures and strategies have a direct bearing upon the speed and completeness by which a business recovers from a major catastrophe and thereby ultimately determine the organization?s capability to survive the event and then move forward to rapidly return to pre-catastrophe status or above.
Let us now examine those factors and concepts that make up effective and efficient backup policies, the types of backup regimes available and their role within an overall disaster and recovery plan.
Rebound – The process of recovery and returning to a ?business as usual? state is known as ?rebound? and it is the decisive factor in managing and validating data integrity, confidentiality and accessibility. Information security breaches would undoubtedly negatively smear an otherwise successful restore operation. Thus confidentiality should be paramount when developing a backup policy.
Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is that a backup policy; no matter how thorough, does not in itself a disaster recovery plan make. It is but one element of the more expansive disaster recovery plan albeit a critical one. Think of it as a team player.
Compartmentalization – Although disaster recovery plans can be very intricate, lengthy and involved it is compartmentalization that allows us to ease the burden of their design, development, implementation, maintenance and updating. All elements should work together transparently as a unit and yet still possess the modularity that allows for their independent parallel development.
Restoration – One critical component of the overall disaster recovery planning process is the ability to restore all data to its pre-catastrophe days. It is here that your backup policies and backup processes weigh heavily