This last of my backup/recovery best practices is far from the least of them:

#10 Conduct regular testing and reviews of your data recovery capabilities 

Backups can be corrupted (especially if they’re tape-based) and too often backups are performed incorrectly. Key files, directories, or components may have been excluded, especially if your infrastructure has undergone adds or deletes.

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Continuing with my views of backup/recovery best practices, I offer up # 6 through #9:

#6 Back up your data locally as well as remotely.

Data restores usually are faster from a local backup source than a remote one, especially for data that you recover frequently.

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Last time, I described the first two backup/recovery best practices. Here are the next three:

#3 Make sure your backup/recovery strategy adheres to all governance and compliance rules that apply to your organization.

Rules abound about data privacy, security, retention — and vary by industry and region.

Look for a reputable advisor who has the experience needed to understand your compliance environment and who successfully completes SAS-70 Type II audits.

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As I see it, there are 10 best practices that can make the difference between backups that really do keep you in business and backups that seem to work okay — until you actually try to use them. Here are the first two:

#1 Understand your data so you can decide what needs to be backed up and how often. 

Base your decisions on the cost of loss, which you can get a sense of by noting the types of data your business relies on — emails, spreadsheets, databases, line-of-business apps, etc. — and determining the impact of losing that information for good and having to recreate it (if you can). Add in the cost of unhappy customers and potential regulatory/compliance violations — and do the math.

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Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, eating turkey, and enjoying the fellowship of family and friends. And no one wants the holiday ruined by a call like this...

“All our customer files have evaporated. As have everyone’s email messages, all pending customer orders, and the accounts receivables database.”

Would you be able to reconstruct that data from scratch? Or, worse, try to move on without it?

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How secure are the data, applications, systems, and networks your business depends on? If you’re like too many of the executives I talk to, you may believe all is well — but only because you haven’t asked the right questions.

One executive told me recently, “We’re cool; we haven’t had to touch our firewalls in three years.”

Another ticked off all the security products his IT guys have installed — but, it turns out, without ever changing the manufacturers’ default passwords.

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As more and more of your employees use mobile devices, these machines may start out behind your firewall — but they don’t stay there. They move around, to other networks with different firewall rules. Or no firewall at all.  

When that mobile device returns to its trusted place behind your firewall, it may carry a cyber-infection that can attack your network from the inside.

The great firewall challenge lies in balancing the tradeoffs between degree of protection, usability, and cost. That balancing act starts with understanding what your firewall actually does.

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I can’t emphasize this enough: All of the technology products and services an organization devotes to securing its data, applications, systems, and networks have but one aim — to protect the value of the business.

Conversely, every data breach reduces the value of the business — and there are more data breaches every year.

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