The importance of Restore

With the upcoming “World Backup Day” (31^st of March), I wanted to write an blog post regarding the importance of restore since this is the most common mistake people do when working with Backup. 

And that’s the thing, we are humans and we are not flawless and therefore we make mistakes. This blog post will shed some lights over the most important part of a backup...namely restore. The other thing that is directly applicable for humans is that we are lazy and if we can rely on a piece of technology we surely will do so. The leads us to the following question, "How could you be sure that your backups are working when you need them the most?" 

The answer is quite simple, try them out!!

Throughout the years helping small, large and global enterprise companies I have noticed that there is something that all of them has in common regardless of the business size their line of business. They simply just focusing on the backups never on the restores.

Here is where I always try to make a difference. Instead of down prioritizing the Backup & Restore conversations the key point of interest should be “How can we bring back our business to an fully operative state?” The most common mistake that organizations does is not to take this matter serious enough. What it all comes down to in the bitter end is the fact that a large number of companies never get back on track with their business after a major incident or a ransomware attack since they don’t prioritize the most important parts, the recovery capabilities of their Business Services.

From the looks of it its seems very complex and hard to determine the levels of restores. I will not lie; it is not just a walk in the park, but it all comes down to what scope you associate your recovery capabilities to have. The best starting point is to start small and understand what Business Services that resides within your organisation and if applicable who is the Business Services owner. In some cases, it will be the IT department itself and in other cases it will be someone in the organization that most likely don’t have a clue what’s going on. Feels hopeless, I understand but here is where the restores tests comes into play.

For all define Business Services try to create a simple Restore Process that will restore your Business Services to a fully operational state. This is something that you of course should do in an isolated environment and never in your production. Note any deviations and mistakes you made in the first version and improve it for the next run. Do this and keep repeating until you achieve your goal of having a fully restored and fully operational Business Service. Its hard work and that is why you should document it down so you will remember it.

The technology at hand for solving this matter i very broad and you shouldn't lock your self in a mindset stating that you can't use other technologies that you already have. I encourage you to "mix-and-match" different technologies available from Microsoft to try to suite your restore demands.

Leverage the good pieces of Azure like Azure Backup Server (DPM) to protect your on premises environment and integrate it with a Recovery Services Vault (RSV) for long time archiving. Use Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for some of your Business Services if they fit the scope for ASR.