Backup & Disaster Recovery
Introduction to our Solution
Some of the UK’s largest Universities rely on Proact to ensure the Data Protection of their critical infrastructure. Today, having confidence in a highly secure backup platform is more important than ever. This is driven by the massive scale of the data being stored plus the complexity of many of the environments being protected that combined provide critical services for staff, students and researchers.
The threat landscape has also become more challenging, Universities data contains vast amounts of sensitive student and staff information including academic records and research data which is of high value to a potential attacker. Cyber criminals have adapted and understand ransomware is worthless if their victim can just recover from the last backup, they therefore often attack the backup infrastructure first with the objective of preventing recovery.
For education backup generally falls into 2 categories:
- Data Loss Prevention: Protection against accidental deletion, hardware failures, software glitches. Regular backups ensure that if any of these incidents occur, you can recover data and continue operations without significant disruptions.
- Protecting Against Ransomware: Ransomware attacks have recently become a major threat for education institutions with high value research data and vast amounts of personal data stored. Having up-to-date, immutable and also air-gapped backups stored away from the main network can mitigate some of the impact of ransomware.
Recovery processes vastly depend on the situation, recovery could be a single file right through to a system or a complete loss of data through a cyber-attack. The key factors in these scenarios are: preventing recovery.
- Minimising Downtime: In case of data loss or system failure, swift data recovery is crucial to minimise downtime and disruptions. Quick recovery helps resume operations without significant impact on staff or students.
- Protecting Intellectual Property: Research data and intellectual property are invaluable assets for higher education institutions. Effective recovery mechanisms safeguard these resources, allowing researchers and faculty members to continue their work quickly following any data loss.
Best Practices for Backup and Recovery:
The 3-2-1 Rule in backup has long been the standard:
- 3 Copies of Data – Maintain three copies of data—the original, and at least two copies.
- 2 Different Types of Media – Use two different storage media types to prevent loss due to media failure.
- 1 Copy Offsite – Keep one copy offsite to prevent the possibility of data loss due to a site-specific failure.
We see a lot of innovation recently with data protection, new and existing vendors have been driving development to extended this protection further.
Many now offer options including an Immutable copy – a copy that cannot be deleted, or an Air-gapped copy – data held on a segregated network not accessible from the primary location, and also a Verified copy – backup has been scanned and verified.
How can we help?
Proact specialises in backup and recovery solutions tailored specifically to cater to the unique needs of higher education institutions.
