This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 25, 2024 - March 31, 2024

Environmental, social and governance (ESG), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable business practices are currently areas that businesses are actively investing in.

Apart from environmental protection and social welfare, corporate governance is a crucial aspect that cannot be overlooked.

With frequent supply chain disruptions and conflicts in recent years, organisations need to ensure the rapid and complete recovery of their operations in the event of damage. This requires pre-planning for disaster recovery, in order to achieve business continuity.

We believe that having a backup mind-set is not enough. To achieve business continuity, it is important to approach the issue from a restoration perspective. Can the data that has been backed up truly be restored correctly and completely?

Businesses should address this question in two stages: firstly, by selecting backup solutions that ensure data restorability, and secondly, by formulating restoration plans that meet their specific needs.

Since backup data can be influenced by various factors, such as static errors, anomalies in application data and hardware failures, it can lead to situations where the backup data cannot be recovered. Therefore, businesses can choose backup systems that natively support backup verification.

For example, they can use virtual machines built into backup devices to restore backup data in a closed environment, test whether the system can be launched, and record the process as a video for users to confirm. If any issues are identified, they can be promptly addressed.

In addition, backup systems should provide a second layer of data protection and verification mechanisms to ensure that data remains intact during the storage process. Therefore, when selecting a backup system, it is important to prioritise devices that can effectively guarantee data accuracy and prevent hardware and human errors from compromising a business’s ability to maintain operational continuity.

For example, backup servers can utilise vertically integrated Btrfs (a copy-on-write file system for Linux) and stable Linux RAID (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks) systems, which actively detect data corruption caused by static errors and restore the damaged data using parity data. Regularly taking immutable snapshots can also prevent the accidental deletion of critical backup data due to human factors.

Furthermore, businesses must regularly conduct restoration drills in order to develop disaster recovery plans that best meet their needs. At this stage, we recommend that businesses design appropriate recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for various types of data.

For example, for customer-facing service systems and internal communication software, the former involves aspects such as customer complaints, transaction data and revenue, aiming for shorter RTOs and minimal data loss in RPOs.

The latter, although it contains various project-related information, can adopt alternative mechanisms such as in-person discussions in the event of an unexpected incident, as long as the subsequent RPO can be kept close to zero loss. At the same time, businesses should also plan properly according to the 3-2-1 backup principle, minimising the probability of complete loss of operational data.

In the face of a rapidly changing market, all businesses should prioritise business continuity and adopt a mindset of “making backups from a restoration perspective” in order to maintain operational resilience and quickly recover operations in the face of various disaster challenges.

Joanne Weng is director of the international business department at Synology, a Taiwan-headquartered corporation that specialises in network-attached storage appliances

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's App Store and Android's Google Play.