What’s your disaster recovery plan?

If you're running a business, you would know the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

This is a perfect topic to discuss seeing this is Cyber Security awareness month, and backups and disaster recovery are an important part of your Cyber Security planning.

For those of you leveraging the cloud, is your only backup saving files to cloud storage?

It's a common misconception that cloud storage is a suitable backup solution i.e. your only backup is you synching or storing your files in OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box etc.

Why is this not considered a backup?

A backup should allow you to recover any file or files from any historic point in time with ease and speed.

The issue with just relying on cloud storage as a backup is that you can inadvertently delete or move things like files and folders, and with it lose your file revision history.

If you're using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, there's more data to protect than just the files stored in cloud storage like Onedrive and Google Drive. Emails, messages, chat history, to name a few.

Just ask the IT team at KPMG who because of a blunder deleted the personal chat histories of 145,000 Microsoft Teams users.

The data was unrecoverable.

There are third-party backup providers who can back up your cloud storage automatically.

Consider it a cloud to cloud backup.

Platforms like Microsoft 365, if set up correctly with the right policies in place can protect and retain data even if deleted. However, restoring files isn't necessarily that quick or straightforward.

A good third party cloud backup solution will provide the simplicity of backup restores when needed. However, not all are created equal, and some don't offer granular restores of data, nor do they back up everything.

Are you using cloud storage as your only backup? Do you back up your cloud storage?