4 Practical Steps for Vendor Cloud Backup

When you entrust your business data to a cloud-based platform, you expect it to be safe and sound. Most cloud platforms such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce recognize their backup limitations and advise using an extra backup and recovery solution for your cloud data. 

Cloud-based platforms may have limited data restoration capabilities, resulting in potential data loss during outages or data corruption.

Unfortunately, many organizations like yours realize a backup is necessary only after their valuable data is lost. Don’t hesitate to deploy a robust backup and recovery solution to safeguard your cloud-based data. Before getting started, understanding best practices can help you maximize your investments. 

The Four Best Practices

Here are four practical steps that you can use to ensure your backup journey is smooth:

Set your expectations 

When you subscribe to a cloud-based platform, you generally get some level of backup and recovery baked into it. However, will that be sufficient? To find out, read the vendor’s terms and conditions (T&Cs) to check their backup plan.

Even if a vendor says that backup is included, you need to know what they actually mean. For example, some cloud-based service providers may only back up data once per day, while others may back up data in real time. 

To reiterate, reading through your vendor’s T&Cs is the first step to ensuring your valuable data doesn’t vanish into thin air.

Fine-tune your backup 

You should customize your backup to meet your needs; otherwise, you run the risk of using the solution either insufficiently or excessively.

To successfully fine-tune your backup, you may need to consider several factors. For instance, you must know how quickly data changes to decide how frequently to back up data.

When deciding the frequency of data backups, it is important to take into consideration other factors such as the amount of data and the type and importance of the data.

Test your backup regularly 

Anyone who has ever lost data understands the importance of backup. However, a backup alone isn’t sufficient. Regular testing is necessary to ensure proper functionality and accessibility of your data when required.

By testing it regularly, you will be able to catch issues early and fix them before it escalates into something severe.

So, how often should you test your backup? The answer may vary based on your backup system and data importance, but as a rule, test your backup at least weekly.

Stay up to date on the security landscape 

As the digital world becomes increasingly complex, so does the security risks landscape. Being aware of data security risks and having prevention strategies in place is crucial due to the wide range of devices and applications we use.

This is critical for both survival and competition. If you’re ready to deal with any threat that may arise, your organization’s chances of survival increase significantly. This strategy will give you an advantage over your competitors because you are now more resilient. 

An IT Service provider can help

If you’re working alone, following the above best practices may be difficult since you have a lot of organizational matters to handle. This is where an IT service provider can help.

We can collaborate to create a backup plan that meets your needs and budget, and provide support and maintenance to keep your data safe. Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation consultation.

Want to learn more? Download our “Why Your Cloud-Based Data Needs a Backup Solution” eBook by clicking here.