Good morning everybody. It’s rance with Turney shank innovations. I’ve met here. Sounds like he’s throwing IT Services Bartlesville things around. So today we’d like to talk about backup and recovery. So their disaster recovery plays into this. That’s really the recovery aspect. Um, how important are backups? So I think this was, this happened before Matt, uh, join me at our current place of employment, but we had a virus infiltrate the network on one PC and then it proceeded to encrypt every single shared drive that it had access to. That was, I’m not even sure what the virus was that it was kind of a, it was an ongoing cleanup effort because we, it was just really spot checking by different departments. Anytime they get into their shared drive, they would look and see what was in, if they needed something which wasn’t typical, then hey, would you get a ticket on this entire folder not having anything in it.
So it, the risk with that was mitigated by the fact that they were doing, I think it was called shadow copy or they were doing backups daily, like three times a day. And we were able to roll back those, um, folders to the last known working state and it took a little, it took a couple of times for that to happen before they relieve and started to uh, take away everybody’s permissions for making changes to share drives. So that’s, that’s a whole other bag of mess to clean. Uh, talk about as far as user access goes, but did you have any experiences with the importance of backup at the, at um, you’re, any place you’ve worked
that Matt back ups are probably one of the most important things you need to do in your infrastructure?
Yeah, I think that’s definitely one of the first things that we imply that we are working on implementing with new IT Services Bartlesville clients is that there’s a couple of things you really want to do within the first week. At least get your backups going for systems, critical servers and also get your monitoring tool in place so that you can keep an eye on what’s going on. And since we use solar winds, I know that the backup piece is kind of baked in. It’s, it’s nice. It’s not necessarily the cheapest, but it’s built into the dashboard that we log into and we can see really everything from a bird’s eye view. Um, I haven’t played too much with the recovery aspect of backups, but that’s another important piece is to test. I mean test your backups. I think most people do it at least once a month. There’s nothing worse than having a backup and it not working because we’ve, I, I haven’t experienced it at our current place of employment, but, and we are in the process of really looking at what other options that are out there for backup and recovery. Uh, we are dealing with on premise servers. So I know solar winds will probably be the one we stick with with regard to that. Just mainly for ease of use. Um, the, the pricing model’s a little, it’s a little different. I know no two MSPS are going to get the same pricing, especially based on client count and users, but it’s imperative that a backup solution be in place, not you can have external drives. Let’s, that’s one step in the right direction. However, those things do fail and it’s not an end all be all solution.
Well my look at backups is, especially on, I guess that can be anywhere, but being in Oklahoma where we’re prone to some tornadoes, bad storms, lightning strikes, stuff like that is that you want that stuff to be copied off side as well. Just because bell say staff, if you keep something on an external hard drive, USB drive, even at a server that’s on site, if a tornado came through or a fire or anything, it can ruin all that data. So
yeah, and that’s, that’s actually it. Best Practices to uh, have a local copy, which that since we’re in the age of the cloud, it’s, it can take some time. And that how long you, how tolerant you are to the back. A recovery process, which you know, if you have onsite it’s obviously going to be faster than if you were backing up to the cloud. It’s good to have two at least two sources of backups. You want one off site, you want at least one off site, which is either a Dr Site, like a data center. And another city and um, or in the cloud, which is basically the same thing. And then you also need a local backups which facilitate a very quick recovery. The local backups are more, they’re their price here because you are paying for the, the uh, storage infrastructure, which is like server hardware licensing.
And then I know the price per terabyte or gigabyte or a gigabyte, however they’re doing that now is going to be more, especially for enterprise level hardware. But it, if it’s a mission critical piece of software or database that you can’t really function without for any period of time than that, it makes sense. It’s just a, it’s a, uh, it’s a relationship to how important is it and how much money would you lose if you don’t have access to this? Okay. Then let’s put in a, an expensive solution to avoid that. But it’s cost mitigation. Yeah. So those are just some, some things to think about, especially with a backup it where you want to back up, how you want to back up. And you also want to be very cognizant of testing those backups and recovery, the recovery aspect being primarily how quickly do you need this, this uh, this data that may or may not have been compromised. So that’s one thing that we do as an MSP. Um, we come in and ask these questions because not everybody is going to really consider, okay, if we can’t take payments, how long, how much money are we going to lose within an hour or two? And the time it takes for the database to be rebuilt and reintegrated, it’s, we just, we have experience with these types of things that lead us to ask specific questions with regard to how you back up, what you’re backing up, what’s, and how quickly his recovery necessary.
Matt, do you have anything to add to that? No, you’re covering it all. So it’s, it’s definitely a major piece and it’s, it’s, it’s good to do it right because not only are you looking at cost mitigation, but you’re also looking at, well you’re looking at cost mitigation, but in varying in various ways you have compliance such as HIPPA or Pci. Make sure if you are using an external IT Services Bartlesville for your backups that they are Hipaa compliant, Pci compliant. I think there’s, and there’s high tech, um, I think those are more guidelines as far as how you want to structure your backups, but you also want to make sure that they work. So top to bottom, uh, have a backup solution at least two sources, one offsite, at least one offsite. Both having both offsites, not terrible, just if you have good internet speeds than be prepared to wait regardless.
But know how quick, how tolerant you would be to a downtime of each individual. Look at your softwares, the different softwares you use internally as different systems. Okay. So that you can really look at it at a granular level to see how tolerant you would be. So I mean you can probably do without email for, you know, a day or two. I think most people would like to extend that for a period of time so they don’t have to answer them. But you know, if that’s a lot different than like, like I mentioned, your payment system, if you can’t take payments, you’re not making money. So that you probably want that app a lot faster than you would want email up sound.
That’s part of the reason I like to think about whenever we’re talking to people like this, what is the secondary way of going about, you know, continue in business while they’re down and being recovered. So
yeah. Yeah. And that’s, I think that would probably fall under, well, that that really goes into the backup. It’s having a downtime solution while they’re unable to do this particular thing. That’s kind of, I mean, that’s, that’s most certainly IT Services Bartlesville specific. Yeah. So I think that pretty much covers it for backup and recovery. Uh, Matt, any parting words?
No. Back, back, back, back test and the backup at least monthly. Hire us and we’ll take care of it. Yeah. Hey that, we’ll do it for you, for joining us. Everybody.