Glossary Terms
What is data resiliency
What is data resiliency?
Data resiliency is an aspirational goal which focuses on having the ability to recover from any number of situations which would have otherwise destroyed critical data. Data resilience measures include assessing the accessibility of your data, whether data can be fully recovered after a critical failure, and whether you can prevent or circumvent failures. Data resiliency can be thought of in terms of ease and speed of recovery from disaster and will often involve a “defense-in-depth” solution involving 3-2-1 backup strategies and other data-integrity solutions. To quote the inimitable thought leader Chumbawamba, data-resiliency makes it possible for your data, in response to any situation or bad actor, to say “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.”.
Why is data resiliency a good idea?
No piece of data storage hardware can be built to last forever, and you can’t prevent accidents or mother nature. Things will happen. At some point in the future, something will fail, whether it’s a trivial issue or a critical problem. Because of that fact, it helps to have a plan in place for when that happens.
Downtime leaves money on the table. Making sure your important business and personal information is equipped with appropriate data resilience means you can bounce back from an emergency and keep working, rather than spending days getting back to where you were before your data loss incident. It also means you’re protected from the worst-case scenario: not being able to recover at all.
How do I make my data resilient?
It all starts with having well-thought out security protocols and a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Prepare for the worst case scenario by cataloging your important data and where it’s stored. Then research and purchase disaster recovery software and/or hardware to guard against cyber attacks malware, and build contingency plans to add additional protection to your most critical business data.
One of the lowest hanging fruits to increase your data resiliency posture is to implement a backup solution, and preferably following the 3-2-1 Backup rule. Having a data backup solution that offers encryption, deduplication and cloud backup is key to making sure your data is secure and can be accessed and recovered in case of a critical failure. Make sure that your backup solution is automated and works in the background as well, so that you can set it on your devices and be sure it is always working for you. There’s nothing worse than having a plan in place but having it fall down because you got distracted at a critical juncture. Data backup and recovery software should help with that.
Preventing failures or making them less likely to occur is also important. For example, using durable SSDs in your laptops and desktops improves your data resilience, because the lack of moving parts means they last longer than spinning disks and are less prone to failure after a drop. Employing surge protection and battery backups can also help you to keep your hardware running and prevent unexpected damage or failures.
Best Practices for data resiliency
It helps to think of data resiliency in terms of the ease and time in which you can expect to recover. For example, if you have irrecoverable data and have to restart from scratch, it will be much slower than restoring critical files from backups.
There’s also a lot out there when it comes to solving this problem. Start with the fundamentals first. You should prioritize your data in terms of stages of recovery: which of your data is the most crucial? What do you need right now? It’s probably easiest to start with a strong backup. Purchase a backup solution that can run in the background of your endpoints, can rapidly recover as much data as you need to continue working, and will otherwise stay out of your way.
Looking to learn more about endpoint backup protection, data loss prevention, and other fundamental components of data resilience? Review CrashPlan’s other resources in our Glossary.
Related Glossaries
CrashPlan® provides peace of mind through secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup. We help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware or an as-of-yet undiscovered calamity.
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