3-2-1 Backup!

There’s no doubt that viruses and malware can do significant damage to your systems and your business. Therefore, every company should have a solid backup and recovery strategy.

While organizations have readily spent thousands of dollars for the best security programs and tools to lock down infrastructure, many have yet to make the same commitment to their data management solutions. In addition, antiquated technology (tape drives) may still be used that may cause downtime to be lengthened if recovery from backups is necessary. With these solutions being a critical component of an organization’s recovery strategy (and necessary in getting systems up and running with minimal disruption and impact to business continuity), surprisingly, data backup continues to be overlooked.

Let’s illustrate this using the “3-2-1 Principle.” The 3-2-1 Principle works for any virtual environment; regardless of the hypervisor you are running (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.). The 3-2-1 backup rule is a revered and time-honored backup strategy recommended by Carnegie Mellon in a US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) paper.[1] The 3-2-1 rule became a popular concept thanks to Peter Krogh, a well-known photographer who wrote that there are two groups of people: those who have already had a storage failure and those who will have one in the future. But, for our purposes, let’s modernize this principle to work for present day businesses.