Backup Strategies from centron: Sensitive Data Optimally Secured – Always Ready for Emergencies

Ensure business continuity with centron’s backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Stay calm, even when the unexpected happens. Disaster recovery for businesses ensures that your company remains operational and well-protected in an emergency.

Why It’s Important

Recovery Through Backup

A typical company processes a wide variety of data, some of which are essential for maintaining business operations. Therefore, data must be secured in a way that enables quick and easy recovery in the event of a disaster (Disaster Recovery).

The benefits are clear: customers experience near-constant availability due to minimal downtime, which strengthens consumer trust and enhances the company’s reputation. Additionally, the company retains control, and financial losses are kept to a minimum. Not to mention, businesses often need to retain accounting and financial data to comply with local, national, or international laws.

Setting up a comprehensive system to back up sensitive business data, with the capability for rapid recovery when needed, helps you as a business owner avoid many risks.

To Keep Your Systems Running

Business continuity and disaster recovery techniques are closely related.

Business continuity management broadly refers to all measures that ensure extreme or emergency situations (such as power outages, pandemics, or natural disasters) have as little impact as possible on a company’s operations and allow activities to be resumed quickly. In this context, disaster recovery plans specifically focus on the rapid restoration of IT systems and stored data.

However, disaster recovery is only effective if you develop a strategy for backing up your data to ensure it can be restored as easily as possible in the future.

You should consider the following points, among others:

How Much Data Loss Am I Willing to Accept?
RPO: Recovery Point Objective

The intervals between backups are determined by your answer to this question. If you don’t want to lose any data, your data must be backed up continuously. If losing a few hours of data wouldn’t be too catastrophic, you can extend the backup intervals accordingly.

When Is It Critical?

How long can you tolerate a system outage before it becomes a business-critical situation?
A complete outage of IT systems for just a few hours could lead to significant revenue losses for large, globally operating retailers. A several-hour or even multi-day outage might not have such a severe impact on websites with relatively low traffic.

Where Should I Back Up?

The ideal location for storing backups is an external hard drive, a network drive, or the cloud, etc. The frequency of backups can vary significantly from company to company. However, since the cloud provider is responsible for providing the latest hardware and software and complying with relevant standards, cloud backups may be the most flexible and practical alternative.

You Have a Variety of Backup Options

What backup options are available, and how should they be optimally utilized?

Which option best suits your needs primarily depends on how frequently your data changes. Various backup strategies can be combined: after a full backup, incremental or differential backups can be performed.

Full Backups

This backup technique always includes your entire data library. It requires the most storage space, which is why the backup intervals are typically longer.

Differential Backups

With this type of backup, only the data that has changed or been added since the last full backup is copied. It consumes significantly less capacity compared to a full backup, allowing for shorter backup intervals. It is possible to delete a specific recovery point without affecting others.

Incremental Backups

With incremental backups, only the data that has changed or been added since the last full or incremental backup is copied. Systems and data can be restored using both a full backup and all incremental backups. Due to the low storage requirements of this method, very frequent backup intervals are practical and feasible.

Because This Is the Right Way

Offline, Online, and Hybrid Backups on Backup Media

Offline backups, stored on internal network devices or hard drives, have the advantage of remaining on-site and being less vulnerable to external threats.

The downside: in the event of a fire at headquarters, the media stored there could also be damaged. While, in theory, online backup media such as the cloud are more likely to be targeted by external attacks, cloud computing providers have developed excellent techniques to protect your data, especially in Germany with its strict data protection standards. Georedundancy and multi-layered security protocols for data centers are just two examples of these techniques.

A hybrid solution combines both types of data backup: storing the data you work with outside of the company prepares you for any eventuality.