The Starting Line: Defining Your RTO and RPO
Before implementing any backup system, a small business must define its tolerance for downtime and data loss. These are your recovery objectives:
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): The maximum amount of time your business can be down following a failure. A higher RTO (e.g., 24 hours) may save money, while a lower RTO (e.g., 4 hours) requires a more sophisticated, and often more costly, solution.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective): The maximum amount of data (measured in time, e.g., 1 hour or 1 day) a company can afford to lose after a system failure.
Knowing these two numbers determines the entire design of your data protection strategy.
Layer 1: The 3-2-1 Backup Rule (The Core Strategy)
The 3-2-1 rule is an industry standard that has been used for decades to build a solid foundation for data protection. It is explicitly designed to prevent a single point of failure (like a fire or human error) from causing chaos.
The rule is simple:
3 Copies of Your Data: Keep the original data plus at least two backup copies.
2 Different Media Types: Store the copies on at least two different storage devices or media (e.g., an internal server and a cloud service).
1 Copy Off-site: Keep at least one backup copy in a separate physical location (usually the cloud) to protect against local disasters like fire, flood, or theft.
Layer 2: Offsite and Immutability (The Ransomware Shield)
While the 3-2-1 rule serves as the baseline, modern cyber threats, particularly ransomware, necessitate a higher standard. Ransomware often attempts to encrypt or delete all data it can access, including local backups connected to the system.
The solution is to add immutability to your off-site copy. Immutability (or air-gapping) ensures that the off-site backup copy cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted by any network activity, including a ransomware attack, until its retention period expires. This provides the ultimate, isolated defense against the most severe cyber threats.
Layer 3: Verification (The Critical Final Step)
The ultimate failure in disaster recovery is discovering a corrupted or unusable backup during a critical outage. Verification is the most overlooked yet crucial step of a backup strategy.
Backup Verification is the process of confirming that your backup data is complete, uncorrupted, and restorable. You are not truly protected unless you have tested that you can recover your data within your target RTO and RPO. Automated verification removes the guesswork and helps meet regulatory compliance mandates.
Tiestech partners with industry leaders like Veeam because their solutions are built around the modern 3-2-1-1-0 standard (where “0” is zero errors in restoration). Veeam provides a robust software platform to manage local copies, replicate data to the cloud, automate verification, and ensure immutability.
Don’t just back up—guarantee recovery. We specialize in creating and managing true Disaster Recovery (DR) plans for SMBs using Veeam’s platform.
Please contact us today for a Free DR Strategy Consultation and make sure your backups work when you need them most.