With the upcoming
“World Backup Day” (31st 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!!
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.
