Data Protection, Backup and Restore

Safeguarding Your Data is a Ciphertex^® Priority

Home » Industries » Data Protection

Data Protection

As data security breaches become more common, data protection has become a daunting challenge for businesses. The costs of cyberattacks can be immense, and even large enterprises struggle to protect themselves. Data breaches have been increasing in number and size over the past few years, with a devastating impact on the reputation and finances of affected companies. To gain customer trust during data collection and processing, businesses must demonstrate transparency, integrity, and reliability at all stages.

Current research indicates that the global financial impact resulting from data breaches and security incidents has exceeded $8 trillion, with a continual upward trend. Additionally, the year 2023 alone witnessed 234 million individuals being adversely affected by such incidents.

Cybercrime is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and as such regulatory entities are creating more demanding data protection requirements.

Strategize Data Protection

Data Management

It is the process of caring for data, from its creation through final deletion. A standard framework has been developed to help ensure that your organization's information stays secure and accessible at all times - this includes storing it properly in an organized manner as well as making sure no one can access inappropriate details or use them without permission.

A sound data protection strategy will help an organization make informed decisions about the type of data they collect, how it is used, and how it is protected. It should also include provisions for responding to data breaches and other security incidents.

Data Risk

To protect your data, you must identify and assess all risks first. These might include things like hackers who want access for malicious purposes or a natural disaster destroying files without warning - but they can also come from within an organization. A well calculated plan should take these potential threats into account with measures designed around minimizing them as much as possible so any valuable data is not exposed or lost.

Data Backup & Recovery

A key element of effective data protection is planning a comprehensive Data Backup & Recovery strategy. Data should be regularly backed up to ensure it can be easily restored if something goes wrong and quickly retrieved when needed. By carefully strategizing a data protection plan, all data should be backed up to safeguard against potential failures, ensuring it can be recovered from any disaster. These steps are critical to having a well-prepared Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan.

Access Management Controls

It is a crucial aspect that should be properly implemented and maintained. These mechanisms ensure that only authorized users gain access to company data, preventing unauthorized use or transfer of information via these methods as well.

Data Storage Management

Data storage management is the process of securely moving production data into one or more external cloud environments for long-term protection. This may be done either on premise, where high performance access to it will require regular rotation in an archival environment. It allows for long-term management and access, but also the ability to securely move production workloads into these environments so they can be quickly restored if needed.

Data Breach Protection

To ensure the safety and security of data, it is vital to implement a cybersecurity plan. The objective is to prevent data threats from gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data whether externally or internally. These include encryption software for maintaining confidentiality on external networks as well as protection against ransomware attacks that could occur when there’s unauthorized access or loss due to exposure.

Confidentiality & Integrity of Data

The key to the protection of data is having a standard approach that defines what goes into it, how we can maintain the Confidentiality and Integrity of data. The approach for protecting data should have a defined standard and measures. This means that the protection methods will need certain standards, such as definitions of what is considered compromised or sensitive information.

Data Protection Policies and Procedures

The key to a successful data management program is well-documented policies and procedures. These two documents define organization uses for protection, and how it's implemented in an audit.

Standards and Regulatory Compliance

Organizations are obliged by law to comply with regulations on data protection. Industry standards help them maintain adequate and current measures, which have been defined by regulatory compliance agencies all over the world.

Back and Restore

What is Backup and Restore?

Backup and restore are two important practices that all computer users should be aware of. Backup is the process of copying your data to a secondary location, usually an external hard drive or cloud storage, so that you can restore it if something happens to your primary data.

This could be a power outage, cyberattack, or other type of disruption. Restore is the process of putting back data that was there before an event occurred which caused data loss. This could be restoring a backup or recovering data from damaged or lost files.

Both backup and restore are important practices to protect your data from accidental or malicious loss. It is essential to have a backup plan in place so that you can quickly and easily restore your data if something happens.

Recovery Time Objective vs. Recovery Point Objective

How you backup your data and applications matter. The key performance indicators you’ll want to be aware of when building your disaster recovery strategy are RTO and RPO. A quick rundown on these terms is all it takes to strategize for any disaster recovery.

The RTO and RPO are important concepts for data backup plans. The maximum time your business can afford to lose access to the information that powers their apps, operations or both is determined by an assessment of how quickly they need systems restored.

The RTO determines how quickly your business needs to be able to recover from a data loss while RPO helps determine how often you should be backing up files and what level of protection will be best suited and the amount of data loss afforded.

Beyond Backup and Restore

When you’re looking for a backup solution, there are many factors to consider. Beyond RTO and RPO-you’ll also want security, scalability, technology, and affordability to keep in mind while choosing the right solution that works best with your needs at any given time.

Differential Backup

Differential backups are a type of incremental backup that only backs up files that have changed since the last full-image backup. This makes differential backups smaller and faster to create than full backups. Differential backups are particularly useful for backing up busy servers, because they minimize the amount of data that needs to be transferred. To restore a differential backup, you need the most recent full-image backup and the most recent differential backup. Restoration will recover all changes made since the last full-image backup.

Incremental Backup

Incremental backups are a great way to keep your data safe while minimizing the amount of storage required. By only saving the changes made since the last full backup, incremental backups take up much less space than full backups. They also allow you to restore your data more quickly, since you don’t have to restore every incremental backup all the way back to the last full backup. Instead, you can just restore the last full backup and the incremental backups from the point you need. This makes incremental backups a great choice for businesses that need to keep as much data as possible but don’t have a lot of storage space.

Full-Image Backup

A full image backup is a technique used to back up your data in its entirety. This means that the full image of your data is stored, which can be used to restore your data in the event of a disaster or system crash. Because this technique takes the longest to store, it’s not typically used on a regular basis. However, it can be very useful in cases where you need to quickly restore your data.

Real-time Backup

A real-time backup, also called a continuous backup, is a method of backing up your data that involves instantly copying every change to your data to a separate storage device. This provides the most granular and comprehensive backup possible, as it captures every change as it happens. This can be useful for businesses that want to ensure that they never lose any data, or for individuals who want to be sure that they always have a recent copy of their files.

Instant Recovery

Instant Recovery is a key benefit of using a backup virtual machine. When the production VM fails, the backup VM takes over instantly, yielding zero downtime. This ensures that your business is always up and running, with no data loss. Instant Recovery also eliminates the need for complex disaster recovery plans.