Making history: The pandemic, disaster recovery and data protection

It was an accomplishment for the ages: within just a couple of days, IT departments hurriedly provided millions of newly homebound employees online access to the data and apps they needed to remain productive.

Some employees were handed laptops as they left the building, while others made do with their own machines. Most connected to their corporate services via VPNs. Other companies harnessed the cloud and software and infrastructure services (SaaS, IaaS).

Bravo, IT! Not only did it all work, businesses and employees both saw the very real benefits of remote life, and that egg is not going back into the shell. Many won’t return to those offices and will continue work from home.

But while immediate access challenges were answered, this was not a long-term solution.

Let’s face it, because of the pandemic a lot of companies were caught off guard with insufficient plans for data protection and disaster recovery (DR). That isn’t easy in the best of times, never mind during a pandemic. Even those with effective strategies now must revisit and update them. Employees have insufficient home security. VPNs are difficult to manage and provision, perform poorly and are hard to scale. And, IT’s domain is now stretched across the corporate data center, cloud (often more than one), user endpoints and multiple SaaS providers.

There’s a lot to do. A plan that fully covers DR, data protection and availability is a must.

Local focus

There are several strategies for protecting endpoints. First off, if employees are using company-issued machines, there are many good mobile machine management products on the market. Sure, setting up clients for a volume of these will be a laborious task, but you’ll have peace of mind knowing data won’t go unprotected.

Another strategy is to create group policies that map the Desktop and My Documents folders directly to the cloud file storage of your choice, no matter if it’s Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox or some other solution. That can simplify file data protection but its success hinges on the employee storing documents in the right place. And if they keep them on their desktop, for example, they’re not going to be protected.

And right there is the rub with protecting employee machines – employees are going to store data on these devices. Often, insecure home Internet connections make these devices and data vulnerable. Further, if you add backup clients and/or software to employee-owned machines, you could encounter some privacy resistance.

Remote desktops can provide an elegant solution. We’ve heard “this is the year of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)” for over a decade. It’s something of a running joke in IT circles, but you know what? The current scenario could very well make this the year of remote desktops after all.

VDI performance in more sophisticated remote desktop solutions has greatly improved. With a robust platform configured properly, end-users can’t store data on their local machines – it’ll be safely kept behind a firewall with on-premises backup systems to protect and secure it.

Further, IT can set up virtual desktops to prevent cut and paste to the device. And because many solutions don’t require a client, it doesn’t matter what machine an employee uses – just make sure proper credentials are needed for access and include multi-factor authentication.

Pain in the SaaS

As if IT doesn’t have enough to worry about, there’s a potential SaaS issue that can cause a lot of pain. Most providers operate under the shared responsibility model. They secure infrastructure, ensure apps are available and data is safe in case of a large-scale disaster. But long-term, responsibility for granular protection of data rests on the shoulders of the customer.

Unfortunately, many organizations are unprepared. A January 2020 survey from OwnBackup of 2,000 Salesforce users found that 52% are not backing up their Salesforce data.

What happens if someone mistakenly deletes a Microsoft Office 365 document vital for a quarterly sales report and it’s not noticed for a while? Microsoft automatically empties recycle bins data after 30 days, so unless there’s backup in place, it’s gone for good.

Backup vendors provide products to protect data in most of the more common SaaS services, but if there’s not a data protection solution for one your organization is using, make data protection part of the service provider’s contract and insist they regularly send along copies of your data.

Making history

When it comes to a significant disaster, highly distributed environments can make recovery difficult. The cloud seems like a clear choice for storing DR and backup data, but while the commodity cloud providers make it easy and cheap to upload data, costs for retrieval are much higher. Also, remember that cloud recovery is different from on-prem, requiring expertise in areas like virtual machines and user access. And, if IT is handling cloud directly and has issues, keep in mind that it could be very difficult getting support.

During a disaster, you want to recover fast; you don’t want to be creating a backup and DR strategy as the leadership grits their teeth due to downtime. So, set your data protection strategy now, be sure each app is included, follow all dependencies and test over and over again. Employees and data may be in varied locations, so be sure you’re completely covered so your company can get back in the game faster.

While IT pulled off an amazing feat handling a rapid remote migration, to ensure your company’s future, you need to be certain it can protect data, even outside of the corporate firewall. With a backup and DR strategy for dispersed data in place, you’ll continue to be in a position to make history, instead of fading away.