Essential Guide to Backup, Recovery, and Archiving for Secure Upgrades (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: In this video, we'll discuss backup, recovery, and archiving. Backups are a very important security measure when upgrading to a new production environment. So before performing any form of upgrade to an application, it's critical that you backup the system and its state before performing the upgrade. That way, if anything goes wrong with the upgrade process itself, you can at least restore back to the original state. The software and data backup process involves much planning and effort on your part. So it's important to make sure that you don't just perform a simple backup of the system, that you take some time to plan what your backup procedure, and also know what your restore procedure will be in case that something does go wrong with the upgrade. It's important to maintain archives of early release versions of the application and any associated data with those release versions. When discussing backups, it's important to consider security of archive backups. The last thing you want to have happen is have somebody steal, let's say, an old backup tape and be able to retrieve your sensitive data, so company data, from that backup. So it's important that you take the time to, again, plan the backup strategy and look to features like employing encryption with your backup to ensure that unauthorized persons can't get access to the data that's stored in the backup itself. It's also important to be aware of any program and data retention cycles that should exist for the application and its data. So a retention cycle is made up of a complete set of backups to fully restore your data. So for example, a lot of backup scenarios involve performing a full backup, let's say, at the beginning of the week, and then doing incremental backups every night after that. So it's important that you know that strategy because when you go to do a restore operation, you would always restore the full backup, and then you restore each incremental after that full backup. So it's very important to be aware of those types of backups and your retention cycle. Retention cycles are stored as a group for a defined retention period. So the full backup and all of its incrementals that follow are going to be stored for a certain period of time. Now, that period of time will depend on, you know, your organization and your organization needs. So determining and managing retention cycles and periods need to be considered. As I mentioned, it is based off what your organizational needs are. But those organizational needs may come from legal requirements or compliance with regulations. So for instance, some industries require to hold those backups for, let's say, up to seven years. So it's very important that you understand any regulations that would govern your organization and ensure that you're following those regulations. In this video, we discussed backup, recovery, and archiving.