Protecting your most crucial infrastructure means understanding every area of your organisation inside and out.
Protecting your mission-critical infrastructure is crucial for an organisation. In a modern setup, any downtime or, worse, being hit by a cyber attack like DDoS or ransomware can significantly damage your processes, reputation, and bottom line.
It’s tempting to take a one-size-fits-all approach to protection, but it’s a trap that many organisations unwittingly fall into.
“Treating everything as critical is a common trap, and a very costly trap too,” said Fergal Meehan, chief commercial officer at Vault365.“It’ s about working out what your tier-one data set is that you want to focus on.
“To get to that, you require a deep understanding of your business processes.”
Meehan mentions that the other flaw is seeing this as an issue for the IT team to tackle. The reality is that mission-critical infrastructure involves everyone, as data resides in all areas of the business.
Some of the questions organisations need to answer when putting their risk management and data strategy together include understanding what critical data is, how long you’ve stored it for and how it relates to data protection and processing policies.
All departments must be aligned in their goals and understanding; otherwise, risk management will be a piecemeal approach.
“It’ s a top-down approach,” he added. “If you get everyone involved in making those choices, you’ll quickly know your critical dataset.
“If you leave it to the IT department, they aren’t going to know what’s critical for one department, so it’s important to have the various policies in place to identify that.
It requires an all-in approach, get everyone in behind the wheel instead of leaving it for the IT managers to sort
Meehan also encourages organisations to view the IT department as facilitators, saying, “They’re there to put together solutions that back up your mission-critical infrastructure, but you have to tell them what they’re working with and what is mission-critical to you.
“Every vertical in the business will have a different view on this, so it’s a team effort to join these up.”
Vault365 specialises in multiple solutions for mission-critical infrastructure, including cloud backup, backup as a service (BaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The organisation brings a significant experience that builds confidence among them and their clients.
“You can say back up everything, but when Vault365 comes in, there are deeper conversations about what is
important to you,” said Meehan. “We’re not talking about using this product, ticking it off, and away you go; we want to know about what you need in areas
like data protection, business continuity, and data storage.
“After talking, they realise there’s much more to backups than they realised. We do this because the last thing you want to realise is that the necessary checks and measures weren’t in place six months later.”
Meehan mentions how he noticed a shift in how organisations connect with providers like Vault365, realising that they add value beyond the products and can show them the bigger picture.
Meehan mentions the 3-2-1-1-0 golden backup rule, which states to have at least three copies of your data, with the backups stored on two different media, one of the copies stored at an offsite location, one copy stored offline and has verified backups without errors.
This comes into play when you consider DRaaS which depends on how your backups are managed and monitored, and is something that Vault365 practices. It also uses Veeam technology, which develops backup, disaster recovery and modern data-protection software for multiple workloads.
“We bring that same expectation, as I believe that’s the bit that’s been missing from a lot of backups, particularly from DRaaS,” he mentioned.
“Customers gain increased automation, the process is further simplified, and their failback processes are better understood.”
A good backup strategy involves determining what data you want to be backed up and protected, putting together your runbook, and building your business continuity plan. Without that, no technology can address those blind spots.
“The technology won’t be there if you don’t understand your actual plan,” he said. “With Vault365 expertise layered on top of those expectations, when they see it working, the customer’s confidence increases.
“That’s one of the biggest things we like to drive with Vault365 – you can go to bed at night and sleep comfortably knowing your data is protected.”
