The Ultimate Guide to a Rock-Solid Cloud Backup Strategy

Data drives modern business operations, which means cyber resilience is a critical safeguard, not just a trendy topic. A robust cloud backup strategy serves as a vital line of defense, turning potential disruption into a manageable challenge and ensuring your business and customer data remain secure and accessible when it matters most. 

An organization’s ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to threats and attacks forms the basis of its reputation in our digital landscape.  Stakeholders, customers, and employees all want to know that you’re confidently handling and protecting their sensitive information.  

Cyber resilience elevates your cloud security from locked doors to nearly impenetrable fortresses. Take a deep dive into what it takes to build a cloud backup strategy and turn your organization into a data fortress that keeps your operations thriving. 

What are the key components of a cloud backup strategy?

Backup is more than keeping data safe in an archive. Modern cloud backups include a range of tools, people, and cloud services all working together to actively store and secure data on an on-going basis. This combination of key elements is at the heart of a robust cloud backup strategy.

Identify critical data for backup

How can you back up anything if you don’t know what you’re protecting? Begin with a data inventory, cataloging the information you have stored across your systems. Classifying what’s critical instead of just useful gives you a better idea of data sensitivity. Decide which encryption levels, backup frequencies, and retention policies are necessary for different data sets.

Implement the 3-2-1 backup rule

The 3-2-1 rule takes its cue from the old saying: Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Maintain at least three copies of your data to ensure redundancy; store it across two different media types, and make sure one of those copies is offsite. Modern cloud environments often include fortifying backups with advanced, interoperable services, robust on-prem storage, and compliant servers located in different data centers in different geographic regions.

Choose cloud storage with high security standards

“The cloud” is customary in business these days, but organizations still worry: How secure is cloud storage? The short answer is very. But not all cloud service providers offer the same types of security. Companies have to do their research to determine their best options. Look for cloud storage that follows standards like ISO/IEC 27017 and ISO 2701 and offers rigorous implementation frameworks, along with advanced security features such as air gapping and encryption so that data remains immutable.

Encrypted data at rest prevents prying eyes from seeing any information even if somehow hackers gain access to where it’s stored. When data in transit is encrypted, it’s protected as it moves between the cloud and your organization. Deploying key management systems where only authorized staff can oversee encryption keys boosts security against insider threats, enhancing encryption services protections.

Because most organizations use a mix of public and private cloud services, they have to make sure they find the right partner. Ultimately, there is no single best cloud provider for backup, rather look for the best provider for your unique needs. Robust cloud backup solutions must be scalable and flexible, adapting to your capacity, and offer features that seamlessly integrate with your applications while remaining compliant with industry legal requirements.

Integrate regulatory compliance

If you handle sensitive or personal customer data, complying with disaster recovery requirements and federal regulations becomes part of the job. Which means, nearly all organizations these days collect some kind of legally protected data and need a robust compliance program.

Beyond compliance, ensuring that your cloud backup strategy follows industry standards is simply the best practice, offering another layer of trust that your organization will be a robust data steward. There are several standards for healthcare, retail, financial services, and criminal justice, among others, including:

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — HIPAA stores public health information (PHI) and electronic public health information (ePHI) in accordance with HIPAA and HITECH.

• Criminal Justice Information Services — CJIS stores sensitive data in compliance with standards for data security, privacy, durability, and protection.

• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — FERPA is a U.S. federal law enacted in 1974 that protects the privacy of student education records.

• General Data Protection Regulation — GDPR stores and maintains personal data in compliance with the mandates for the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK).

Test backup integrity and recovery procedures early and often

Remember all the fire drills you had in school? Your data doesn’t deserve anything less, but only a minority of companies are testing their backup’s failure capabilities on a regular basis or have cohesive, organized mechanisms in place in the event of a disaster.

Backup is only as good as its recovery time. Run regular drills, simulated cyber-attacks, and system failures and then validate results to ensure your data integrity remains as impenetrable as possible. Regular testing reassures your teams that they can confidently and effectively manage crises.

Automate backup solutions for consistency

Automating cloud backups can reduce human error and keep your backup routine consistent. Establish a schedule based on metrics that work for your organization. Do you need a full backup every single second? Probably not. But incrementally backing up some data in daily operations while writing a full backup once a week might keep data intact without overwhelming your already in-demand IT staff. Verify your processes and adjust your practices to adapt to any changes in your datasets.

Use advanced security techniques for cloud backups

An unbreakable cloud backup strategy is only as strong as its weakest link. Having followed the 3-2-1 rule, created immutable backups and encrypted data, and formulated compliance, what happens when the people inside the system are compromised? Advanced cloud security features take a Zero Trust approach—meaning access is given only when everything is verified in multiple steps—so when the call is coming from inside the house, you can just hang up.

Incorporate role-based access control to enhance security

As part of a Zero Trust framework, every application and user are assigned their own credentials through identity management tools and role-based access controls. Even if one set of credentials is compromised, the remaining sets are still secure. A Zero Trust framework includes:

• Least privilege access, which gives users only the necessary access for the necessary time.

• Audit trails that maintain logs of all access to backup data for forensic analysis.

• Real-time monitoring, which relies on tools that can alert you about unusual activities or access patterns.

Multi-factor authentication and Multi-User Authentication

To add more bricks to the fortress, even after access controls are established, you need to enact authentication procedures. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is deployed in a cloud backup strategy to ensure users are who they say they are, using multiple identification steps. Typically, after entering a password, a user will need to receive and confirm a secondary access, like a code sent to a personal device, before the system lets them in.

Multi-User Authentication, a feature unique to Wasabi, works on the same principle, but involves more than one person to confirm access. Unlike traditional models where one person controls critical actions like backup deletions, Multi-User Authentication distributes decision-making across multiple users, minimizing the risk of a single point of failure.

Optimize cloud backup for efficient recovery and resilience

Building the best cloud backup system is only the first step in cyber resilience. Once you’ve established the right policies and procedures, and implemented the most advanced security tools, you’re ready to optimize your cloud backup strategy to recover from any data loss. If your system unexpectedly shuts down, do you know how much time you have before the loss of critical function? Seconds? Hours? Days? And what data can you really afford to lose? Did you backup key operations data the moment before, or the day before the loss?

Knowing the answers long before they’re ever called into question is the difference between preparedness and disaster. An optimized cloud backup strategy includes contingency plans for efficient recovery.

Recovery time objectives provide business continuity

RTO helps you know how quickly you need to recover data after a breach. How long after a shutdown will you lose critical function? Do your current policies and procedures ensure you meet that timeline? The RTO is the maximum length of time you can be down after a failure. For a hospital ER, let’s say, that time could be measured in seconds. But an email server might have a few hours to right itself if it goes down.

Set RTOs based on the applications you’re using and their impact on business. How will the outage affect revenue, customers, or other metrics? Configure the recovery environment to mitigate those impacts.

Recovery point objectives restore confidence

RPO will determine how much data you can afford to lose in any downtime, whether it be from a breach, natural disaster, or a power outage. Knowing that acceptable amount, typically measured in time, will guide how frequently you’re backing up data sets. If it takes too long to recover, will that data be of sufficient use to your organization? Restore operations quickly and efficiently within a reasonable time by using this key metric.

Here’s where compliance plays a significant role. Companies operating in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare will have to consider regulatory requirements when establishing RPOs. Payment portals and asset databases might have less than a minute’s worth of data as an acceptable objective. But a retail website’s blog could have a full day RPO.

Not all cloud backup solutions can perform equally well when it comes to RTO and RPO. And fastest is not always best, especially if you’re paying top dollar for a feature that isn’t really necessary in your industry. Viewing disaster recovery as an investment rather than a cost center helps add perspective as you build your cloud backup strategy.

Disaster recovery plan automation: one plan to rule them all

Like any world-class orchestra, a robust disaster recovery plan can be managed by a strong conductor. Automating recovery processes ensures that the steps it takes to restore data and reboot systems will occur in the right order and at the right time, taking the burden off data recovery teams and reducing downtime risks in high-stress situations.

Recovery automation comprises a range of monitoring and testing tools designed to reduce downtime and human error. Common tools include monitoring and testing capabilities, along with live disaster simulations, to determine whether data recovery systems are actionable and effective. Automated platforms will gather data and provide key performance insights, so you have an ongoing pulse on the health of your data systems.

Take cyber resilience to the next level with Wasabi

An unbreakable cloud backup strategy is the backbone in your effort to defend, detect, respond, and recover even when cyber threats seem overwhelming. But data recovery is about more than just getting back online when your business and reputation are at stake. Cyber resilience success requires a comprehensive approach that integrates technology, processes, and people so you’re not only securing data but reassuring users you have the ability to keep their data safe in the face of cyber incidents.

Managing cloud backups doesn’t have to be costly, complex, or overwhelming. Consider integrated solutions that offer backup, security, and recovery in one platform. Our innovative approach to seamless, immutable storage enables strong data protections without complications or excessive costs.

Protect against ransomware attacks or accidental deletions with free immutable storage options at the bucket and object level with Wasabi Object Lock and let our predictable pricing model provides bottom-line peace of mind. Explore how our backup and recovery solutions can help keep your data safe.