If your organization has difficulty protecting company data, it can result in cyberattacks and data breaches that might compromise important, sensitive company information.
Cyberattacks and data breaches can result in customer data being stolen resulting in lawsuits, lost customers and revenue, tarnished business reputation, and extended network downtime. Additionally, this can lead to decreased productivity and efficiency.
In addition to lost revenue caused by the attack, your organization may also need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair your damaged network.
For these reasons, it is important to understand how backup and continuity plans will help you protect sensitive data and avoid the challenges that come with these attacks.
COEO understands the importance of data security and has helped thousands of organizations develop backup and continuity plans to enhance their data security and prevent data breaches and cyberattacks.
By the end of this article, you will understand what a backup plan is, what a continuity plan is, how they are used to protect your data, and whether either is appropriate for your organization.
What is a data backup plan?
A data backup plan is a strategy designed to ensure that an organization’s data is regularly backed up and saved. This enables organizations to save the data to ensure it is secure should a data breach or cyberattack occur.
A data backup plan also ensures that data is backed up and safe during natural disasters. Data backup plans can be essential to maintain business continuity and ensure that sensitive data is protected and not lost during a disaster.
What is a continuity plan?
A business continuity plan is a documented business plan that outlines how a business will continue operations during and after a disaster occurs.
Disasters such as cyberattacks, equipment failures, and natural disasters can occur at any time and often without warning. Because of this, it is important to have a business continuity plan in place just in case.
A business continuity plan is essentially a “what if?” plan that puts together proactive strategies to maintain business operations even during and shortly after emergency events.
How to use data backup and continuity plans for better data security
Now you understand what data backup and continuity plans are. However, it is important that you also understand how they can both be used to provide better security for important and sensitive company data. Some of the ways you can use these strategies to improve data security include:
Require frequent, strong data backups
To maintain data security, it is essential to implement frequent and robust backups across all devices on the network.
Unique business requirements, such as the size of the organization, the amount of data that is saved, the industry, and the sensitivity of the data, determine the frequency of backups and the type of backup used.
Data backups may look different across organizations, but businesses should perform regular data backups to on-site or off-site storage facilities. Organizations may also back up data using a combination of on-site and off-site facilities.
For example, a financial services organization might choose to back up its data more frequently so that customer data is always updated, accurate, and available.
Use data backup plans to aid business continuity
While data backup and continuity plans are separate practices, they both require adequate preparation.
A continuity plan has to be created and set up before a crisis takes place. However, data backup plans have to be conducted during business hours before and during a disaster event.
Once a disaster, such as a network outage, a natural disaster, or a cyberattack occurs, the goal of the business continuity plan is to restore normal business operations as quickly as possible and protect data when the network is vulnerable following a disaster.
However, organizations cannot successfully follow a continuity plan and restore their network completely without performing frequent data backups prior to a disaster.
Backup plans are crucial in supporting business continuity plans, enabling businesses to resume operations as quickly as possible following a disaster.
Is a data backup or continuity plan appropriate for your organization?
Now that you understand what a data backup plan is, what a continuity plan is, and how they work together to improve data security. However, it is also important to understand whether a data backup or continuity plan is appropriate for your organization.
If your organization is concerned about data within your network being breached, corrupted, or compromised, creating a data backup plan is an important solution to ensure that data remains accessible even in the event of a breach.
Additionally, if your organization has industry-specific legal compliance requirements regarding data protection, implementing a data backup plan may be the right solution to remain compliant and avoid legal consequences.
If your organization is looking to implement a strategy that enables your business to maintain or resume business functions during and after a disaster, a business continuity plan may also be a good solution.
If your organization discovers a potential threat to your network as a result of a risk assessment, a business continuity plan may be appropriate to mitigate this threat and reduce network downtime if the potential threat were to affect your infrastructure.
However, if you are looking to get the most out of your continuity plan to ensure your network is back up and running as quickly as possible following an attack, you should incorporate both a data backup plan and a continuity plan to ensure data is restored and protected before, during, and after a disaster.
Determining whether data backup and continuity plans can help your organization secure its data
Now you understand what a data backup plan is, what a continuity plan is, how they can be used to secure your data, and whether either plan is appropriate for your organization. This will help you determine if a data backup or continuity plan can help secure your data.
Without reliable data backup and continuity plans, your data security may be vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches. Additionally, it can be more difficult to restore business operations during and after a disaster without one or both of these plans in place.
To avoid being a victim of a cyberattack, having data compromised, and having extended downtime after a disaster takes place, it is important to understand how to use data backup and continuity plans to improve data security.
COEO understands how important data security and disaster recovery are and has helped thousands of organizations with their data backup and continuity plans to ensure their data is safe and able to restore business activities after a disaster.
We want you to understand the ways that backup data and continuity plans can help secure your data so you can understand if they are appropriate for your organization.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about data backup and continuity plans or ask any questions you may have, you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand how data backup and continuity plans can be used to improve data security, click the button below to receive our 10-step continuity plan:
