As rapid shifts in business towards remote work give way to more consistent structures, business managers face a new challenge: Data Security.

With the rise in remote work and employees now using a combination of company-provided devices as well as their own to access corporate networks, the attack surface has increased exponentially. That being said, a recent survey found that 91% of businesses have reported an uptick in cyberattacks since COVID-19 began. While proactive, protective measures will help detect and deflect some cyber security attacks, no defense is perfect. This is why it is critical for businesses to have a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan.

Boosting BDR

So how do business owners create a BDR plan? Firstly, not matter the end goal the starting point should be the same: Complete a thorough assessment of your current BDR plans and outcomes. Consider measuring the recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). While pre-pandemic goals were largely focused on on site datacenter DR and backups. However, with the distributed nature of remote work, your current BDR plan requires a reassessment of how long recovery needs to take and where it should take place first.

If your RTOs and RPOs are up to pandemic expectations, the next step is to evaluate the ability of the existing infrastructure to meet expectations. Does your BDR plan have the capacity to handle recovery objectives both in-office and at a distance? A combination of on-site and cloud-capable solutions could help bridge the recovery objective gap.

Next, organizations must consider where their data is collected and how workers connect to the data needed to perform their job duties.. Consider the case of a single-sourced data solution; if a natural disaster or cyberattack makes the information unavailable, the impact to both employee performance and business revenue could be detrimental. Corporate networks also come with the same concern. If a standard connection fails, how can remote staff keep working?

Solving these issues starts with a strategy that utilizes multi-site BDR that backs up your data every few minutes combined with secondary connections, such as a VPN.

Remote work is now the norm, not the exception. To reduce operational risk through data loss, a robust BDR strategy is a requirement. For more information, check out the accompanying infographic below.

Infographic created by MXOtech, a remote network management company