Database backup and restoration policies are essential to ensure data retention and database resilience, including recovery from:

• Data loss

• Accidental deletion

• Corrupt data (for example: from viruses)

• Infrastructure issues (for example: failed discs)

• System outages (for example: power failure)

• Disaster recovery (for example: fire, flooding and so on)

Your backup strategy should include a regular backup schedule that is implemented out of hours to minimise the impact on database performance. Backups must be encrypted to ensure data protection and stored off-site in the event of an outage at your primary site.

Your database backup policy must meet your Recovery Point Object (RPO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Level Objectives (RLO) requirements.

Database backup and restoration policies ensure that you can:

• Access database backups (for example: off-site tape rotation or cloud access and so on)

• Restore your database from your backup media

• Ensure that you are retaining the relevant data

• Test your end-to-end recovery process

Index management must be performed on a regular basis to ensure that your database is optimised for performance.

Index management tasks include:

• Index rebuilding

• Reorganisation

• Statistical updates

Database Integrity checks must be performed to identify database corruption in:

• System databases

• User databases

Database monitoring and alerting must be used to ensure that hardware and software issues are reported in a timely manner.

Hardware monitoring includes:

• Server shut down or reboot

• Disk capacity

• Disk failures

• Memory failures

• Memory usage

Software monitoring includes:

• Database error codes (for example: 823, 824, 825 and so on)

• Expensive or performance degrading queries

• Deadlocks

• Long duration locks or long running jobs

• Missing indexes

• Cluster software failures or fail-overs

A regular update (patching) process is essential to ensure that your applications (for example: SQL Server) and infrastructure benefit from the latest security updates, bug fixes and new features. Updates must be performed out of hours to prevent system downtime.