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For many SMEs , the first step in Disaster Recovery and security is to back up their data – but this doesn ’ t go quite far enough according to Matthew Hodson , Co- Founder and CIO of Valeo Networks . He tells us about the current limitations to SME Disaster Recovery approaches and offers his recommended best practice approach for SMBs looking to improve their strategies .

Although companies generally focus on backing up their data , they may not always consider how long it takes to restore that data . To tie in with that , a lot of companies ( especially smaller ones ) will do flat file backups , which means just backing up the raw , critical company files . Although you do need those , it doesn ’ t address the problem of how long it ’ s going to take to restore them . So , if a company ’ s server crashes and they only back up the flat files , they still have to reinstall the operating system and all the different software applications along with configuring them and restoring the data .

There are cheap data backup solutions out there , but they won ’ t be much help to address the issue of downtime . With many companies only worried about backing up the data , not how long it takes to restore , a lot of SMBs will backup flat file backups over the Internet .

It can take days or weeks to download all that raw data over the Internet . Instead , they should do an image-based backup on-site and then in the cloud .

Another limitation is that many companies aren ’ t able to spend the time or the money to truly monitor the backups correctly and the ones that do often don ’ t take the time to actually restore the backup to see if it ’ s viable . Just because the backup software says it was successful doesn ’ t necessarily mean it can be restored due to corrupted data or other issues that may arise . Ideally , companies should do a daily restore to make sure they can actually get the data back .

IDEALLY , COMPANIES SHOULD DO A DAILY RESTORE TO MAKE SURE THEY CAN ACTUALLY GET THE DATA BACK .