All Australian businesses require cloud backup to protect them from a data disaster. Whether it’s a power outage, a software corruption, or one of the, let’s say, sillier office employees made a truly costly error, it’s imperative that your company has a trusted solution to recover the data in case something goes drastically wrong in a short timeframe.
This is where the most efficient cloud online Australia has available comes in handy, ensuring your business is safe from all kinds of unfortunate incidents, from destruction to theft and every shabby little thing in between.
The best system works on the 3-2-1 rule, which ensures your company can easily recover its data when something bad goes down.
Let’s take a closer look at the 3-2-1 rule, and why it’s such a winner for Aussie business owners:
So, what is the 3-2-1 rule?
The 3-2-1 rule essentially stipulates that your data backup solution covers the following essential requirements:
- You have three copies of your data
The first rule is that you should always have three distinct copies of your data, with one being production data (aka data that is used for real-world purposes) and two easily-accessible backups.
Each of the data’s copies should be configured and stored in a manner that it will be accessible even if its corresponding copies fail or disappear. Finally, each of these copies should have the same version of the data, meaning that you can’t satisfy the 3-2-1 rule if you only have one copy of data from a backup that was performed the day before and two other copies created the week earlier.
All copies have to have the same data from the very same point in time, and although creating data backups from multiple points in time is also a fine idea, it doesn’t coincide with this particular recovery solution.
This is the ideal way to perform the 3-2-1 solution which cannot work in terms of big production data sets. To figure out how often you should backup your production data to meet your business’s needs, you should refer to the recovery time and recovery point objective concepts, as they will provide the best indication for your backup consistency.
- You should have two storage media types for your data
Next, you require at least two of the copies of your data and these should exist on storage devices that are kept physically separated from one another. This means that one could be on a flash drive that is not connected to the server whilst the other is on a network-attached file server or other device.
Storing different data copies on different internal hard drives on the same server will not work properly, because if that server fails then everything fails. For the very same reason, you won’t comply with the 3-2-1 rule if you are storing multiple copies of your backups on the same RAID array, and the same goes if you are storing your backups on the same cloud, meaning you should always keep the storage media separate from one another.
- You should keep one data copy offsite
The final part of the 3-2-1 rule stipulates that one copy of your data must exist in a safe and secure offsite location, one that is away from your premises and can safely store your data in the event of a disaster.
This means that if you have two copies of data at your location then you can have one at another location which hasn’t experienced the same disaster, thus providing an amazingly effective disaster recovery solution!
