You never know when exactly you’ll find out you need to have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place. Last Friday, the Portland area experienced significant rainfall amounts, which caused widespread flooding and damage. Although rain in the Pacific Northwest is rather common, receiving it all at once is not nearly as common.

Strong and resilient backups are the most important piece of protecting your business. Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving arms race. Antivirus, spam filtering, and firewall vendors are all constantly plugging holes and vulnerabilities only for malicious actors to abandon their old tricks and find new ones. No matter how elaborate your security mechanisms are, they will never truly be 100% effective forever; there will always be some small risk. Whether that’s a brand-new exploit or users being tricked, malware and scammers will always try to find a way in. Those protective measures also won’t do much good against natural disasters or hardware failure, either.

As we pointed out in our blog post earlier this month, while backups are essential for the health of your business, there are many details which often remain overlooked in a basic backup plan. These oversights can render any strategy useless just when you need it the most…even if there are backup files available somewhere.

Having the right backup solution can save your company from losing important data, having to pay a ransom to retrieve it, or potentially costing your business the valuable secrets that keep it competitive. At the very least, nobody wants to re-key all of their accounting data if something goes wrong after, say, a long period-end process. These are all real consequences that have brought clients to us for help and a plan.

Still, it’s difficult to know how to begin developing a backup plan without some guidance. Here are some key questions we ask when helping customers design a new backup strategy…or evaluate the effectiveness of a current one: