Customer Responsibilities for Successful Backup and Recovery

Customer Responsibilities for Successful Backup and Recovery

Purpose

This document outlines the responsibilities of customers to help ensure successful backup and recovery operations using BDRShield.

While BDRShield provides backup, recovery, monitoring, and cyber resilience capabilities, maintaining a healthy backup environment is a shared responsibility between BDRShield and the customer. Customers are responsible for monitoring backup operations, maintaining the underlying infrastructure, protecting backup environments, and periodically validating recoverability.

Failure to perform the activities outlined in this document may result in unsuccessful backups, incomplete recoveries, increased recovery times, or potential data loss.

1. Backup Monitoring

Customers should regularly monitor backup operations to ensure backups are completing successfully and any issues are addressed promptly.

Daily Responsibilities

  • Review backup job reports and investigate any failed, incomplete, or partially successful backup jobs.
  • Resolve backup failures and rerun failed backup jobs where necessary.
  • Confirm that all scheduled backups have completed successfully.
  • Monitor the BDRShield Dashboard and configured email alerts for:
    • Backup failures
    • Backup verification failures
    • RPO violations
    • Storage warnings
    • Licensing alerts
    • Other critical notifications

2. Backup Verification & Recovery Readiness

Successful backups alone do not guarantee successful recovery. Customers should regularly validate recoverability.

Daily

  • Review Automatic Backup Verification (Instant Boot Verification) reports if the feature is enabled.
  • If Automatic Backup Verification is not enabled, perform manual recovery verification (such as Instant Boot) for critical workloads.
  • Perform restore testing for critical workloads and critical business data to validate end-to-end recoverability.

After Major Environment Changes

Review and update below configurations to ensure they continue to meet business recovery objectives.

  • Backup schedules
  • Backup policies
  • Retention settings
  • Protected workloads

3. Backup Strategy

Customers are responsible for designing an appropriate backup strategy that aligns with their business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

  • Maintain secondary backup copies where appropriate.
  • Maintain offsite or disaster recovery (DR) copies.
  • Use immutable backup copies where supported.
  • Follow industry best practices such as the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
  • Configure periodic full backups where recommended for the workload.

4. Storage & Backup Repository Responsibilities

Reliable storage is essential for successful backup and recovery.

Capacity

  • Ensure sufficient free space is available in backup repositories.
  • Monitor backup growth trends and plan storage expansion before capacity limits are reached.

Repository Health

Regularly verify:

  • Repository accessibility
  • Repository integrity
  • Storage performance
  • Hardware health
  • RAID health (where applicable)

NAS Storage

When using NAS as backup storage:

  • Use enterprise-grade storage designed for backup workloads.
  • Ensure storage meets BDRShield hardware and performance recommendations.
  • Prefer block-level storage (such as iSCSI) where appropriate.
  • Avoid unsupported NAS configurations.

RAID Protection

Where local RAID storage is used:

  • Use protected write cache (battery-backed or flash-backed cache) where available.
  • Monitor RAID status regularly.
  • Replace failed disks promptly. 

5. Infrastructure Responsibilities

Customers are responsible for maintaining the health of the infrastructure supporting backup operations.

System Health

Regularly verify:

  • CPU utilization
  • Memory availability
  • Disk health
  • Hardware status

Network Connectivity

Maintain reliable connectivity between:

  • Protected workloads
  • Backup servers
  • Backup repositories
  • Cloud storage
  • Management components

Ensure sufficient bandwidth is available to meet backup and recovery objectives.

DNS Resolution

Ensure proper hostname resolution and DNS connectivity between all BDRShield components and protected systems.

Time Synchronization

Maintain accurate time synchronization (NTP) across:

  • Backup servers
  • Protected workloads
  • Hypervisors
  • Storage devices
  • Domain controllers

Snapshot Management

When protecting virtual workloads:

  • Ensure virtualization snapshots are properly managed.
  • Avoid orphaned or long-running snapshots.

Power Protection

Protect backup infrastructure using appropriate UPS systems to minimize backup interruption and reduce the risk of storage corruption during power failures.

After Infrastructure Changes

Following any infrastructure, network, or storage change:

  • Confirm backup jobs continue to complete successfully.
  • Verify recovery operations remain functional. 

6. Security Responsibilities

Customers are responsible for securing the backup environment.

Administrative Access

Protect:

  • Administrative accounts
  • Backup credentials
  • Service accounts
  • API keys
  • Encryption keys
  • Other sensitive authentication information

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Enable and maintain MFA wherever supported.

Firewall & Network Configuration

Ensure required firewall rules and communication ports remain open between:

  • Protected workloads
  • Backup servers
  • Backup repositories
  • Cloud services

Antivirus & Endpoint Protection

Configure antivirus and endpoint protection exclusions for:

  • BDRShield installation directories
  • Executables
  • Services
  • Backup repositories
  • Temporary working directories

as recommended by BDRShield documentation.

Backup Encryption

Where required:

  • Enable backup encryption.
  • Secure encryption keys.
  • Protect repositories using appropriate access controls.
  • Use immutable storage where supported.

Software Updates

Keep BDRShield and supported operating systems updated with recommended releases and security updates.

7. Access & Credential Management

Customers are responsible for maintaining valid authentication credentials used for backup operations.

Ongoing Responsibilities

Update BDRShield configurations whenever there are changes to:

  • Passwords
  • Service accounts
  • Expired credentials
  • User permissions
  • API tokens
  • Authentication methods

Failure to update credentials may result in backup failures.

8. Licensing Responsibilities

Customers are responsible for maintaining valid software licensing.

Ongoing Responsibilities

  • Ensure all required licenses remain active.
  • Monitor license consumption and usage.
  • Renew licenses before expiration to prevent service interruption.

9. Workload-Specific Responsibilities

Certain workloads may require additional configuration or maintenance beyond the general responsibilities described in this document.

Customers are responsible for:

  • Following workload-specific deployment and configuration best practices.
  • Maintaining supported operating systems, applications, hypervisors, and cloud services.
  • Ensuring application-specific requirements are satisfied for application-consistent backups.
  • Reviewing workload-specific documentation whenever infrastructure or application changes occur. 

10. Other Customer Responsibilities

Customers should also:

  • Review backup and recovery policies periodically to ensure they continue to meet business and compliance requirements.
  • Document recovery procedures for critical systems.
  • Periodically validate disaster recovery plans.
  • Maintain appropriate administrative documentation for backup infrastructure.
  • Notify relevant stakeholders when backup issues could impact business continuity.

Customer Responsibility Summary

Area

Customer Responsibility

Backup Monitoring

Review backup reports, investigate failures, rerun failed jobs, monitor dashboard and alerts

Recovery Readiness

Review verification reports, perform restore testing, validate recoverability

Backup Strategy

Maintain offsite and immutable copies, follow the 3-2-1 strategy

Storage

Monitor capacity, repository health, NAS configuration, RAID health

Infrastructure

Maintain hardware, networking, DNS, NTP, snapshots, UPS protection

Security

Protect credentials, configure firewall rules, antivirus exclusions, MFA, encryption

Credentials

Maintain valid credentials and update configuration after changes

Licensing

Monitor license usage and renew before expiration

Workloads

Maintain workload-specific requirements and supported environments

Documentation & DR

Maintain recovery documentation and periodically validate disaster recovery readiness

Shared Responsibility

BDRShield provides the software capabilities required for backup, recovery, monitoring, verification, and cyber resilience. However, the successful protection and recovery of data also depends on customers properly maintaining their backup environment, infrastructure, security, storage, and operational processes.

Meeting the responsibilities outlined in this document helps maximize backup reliability, recovery success, and overall cyber resilience.



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