Hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments are quickly becoming the norm, which means multiple points of possible vulnerability for your business.

A recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that a whopping 85% of respondents use more than one cloud environment, and just about every company surveyed said they are using some form of cloud computing to deliver testing, development, quality assurance, production and disaster recovery services.

There’s a general assumption that backup and disaster recovery are automatically included in cloud; however, in most clouds, this needs to be contracted separately. And even when an active-active environment is used in the cloud or on-premises for availability, it’s still vital to make sure that the data itself is protected from corruption in the event of a cyber attack.

To support resiliency and to ensure your business can recover from disruption or a cyber attack, it’s important to look at the backup and recovery strategy for each environment, as well as the end-to-end environment.

Ready to begin but not sure where to start? Use my checklist to assess your current backup and disaster recovery plan:

Improve your ability to respond and recover from disruptive events

Backup and disaster recovery checklist

• What does our contract include?
• Does our backup policy align with regulatory and business requirements?
• Do we know where our data is backed up to?
• Is our backup data kept offsite as well as onsite?
• Is the data backup protected from cyber infection?
• How frequently do we access these backups? Is the cost of backup recovery transparent? What is the SLA for access to backed up files?
• What is the granularity of recovery? Does the whole cloud site have to fail before it will be recovered? Can we recover application by application?
• How is the recovery plan integrated with our overall resiliency plan? Are we able to do end-to-end testing? Do we have end-to-end visibility?
• How is our data protected from corruption and cyber attacks? Is it recoverable?
• What is the agreed recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for our applications?

Resiliency is an ongoing journey. As IT environments continue to grow and become more complex, business resiliency efforts to scrutinize your disaster recovery and backup requirements become priceless.