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A Glossary of Key Terms in Data Recovery & Protection for HR & Recruiting

In today’s fast-paced HR and recruiting landscape, data is your most valuable asset. From candidate pipelines and employee records to sensitive personal information, protecting this data is not just a best practice—it’s a regulatory mandate and a cornerstone of operational resilience. Understanding the core concepts of data recovery and protection is essential for HR and recruiting professionals to safeguard critical information, ensure business continuity, and maintain trust. This glossary provides definitions for key terms, tailored to their relevance and practical application within your daily operations, highlighting how automation and strategic planning can bolster your defenses.

Data Backup

Data backup refers to the process of creating copies of data that can be used to restore the original data after a data loss event. For HR and recruiting, this includes copying candidate resumes, employee profiles, payroll information, performance reviews, and CRM data. Regular, automated backups are crucial to prevent loss from system failures, human error, or cyberattacks. Implementing automated backup solutions, like those integrated with Keap or other CRMs, ensures that critical HR data is always recoverable, minimizing disruption to recruitment drives and employee management processes.

Data Recovery

Data recovery is the process of retrieving lost, deleted, corrupted, or inaccessible data from storage devices or systems. In an HR context, this could mean restoring a lost database of applicant tracking records, recovering inadvertently deleted employee files, or bringing back a corrupted CRM instance. Effective data recovery strategies are a critical component of any business continuity plan, ensuring that HR and recruiting operations can quickly resume after an incident. Automation plays a vital role by streamlining recovery procedures, reducing manual intervention, and accelerating the time-to-recovery for essential people-data.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the creation of a system of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. For HR and recruiting, BCP ensures that essential functions—such as payroll processing, onboarding, and active recruitment—can continue during and after a disaster, whether it’s a natural calamity, a cyberattack, or a significant system outage. An effective BCP includes data recovery strategies, redundant systems, and clear communication protocols, ensuring that your HR team can maintain operational capacity and support employees even under adverse circumstances, often leveraging automated failover and data replication technologies.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a specific component of Business Continuity Planning focused on restoring IT infrastructure and operations after a disruptive event. For HR and recruiting departments, this means having protocols and technologies in place to recover access to applicant tracking systems, HRIS platforms, payroll software, and communication tools. DR plans often involve offsite data replication, cloud-based recovery environments, and predefined steps to bring critical systems back online. Automated DR solutions can drastically reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), ensuring minimal data loss and rapid restoration of essential HR services.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. For instance, an RPO of 1 hour means that in a disaster, you can afford to lose no more than one hour’s worth of data. For HR and recruiting, determining RPO is crucial for sensitive data like real-time applicant submissions or daily payroll changes. A lower RPO typically requires more frequent backups or continuous data replication, often achievable through automated backup processes that capture changes incrementally, ensuring that very little critical HR data is permanently lost.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specifies the maximum acceptable duration of time that a computer system, application, or network can be down after a disaster before unacceptable consequences arise. For HR and recruiting, RTO dictates how quickly systems like your ATS, HRIS, or CRM must be fully operational again to avoid significant impact on operations, candidate experience, or employee relations. Achieving a low RTO often involves automated recovery procedures, pre-configured standby systems, and robust infrastructure, ensuring that your team can resume critical functions without prolonged downtime.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) refers to a set of tools and processes designed to ensure that sensitive data is not lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorized users. In HR and recruiting, DLP is critical for protecting confidential employee information, candidate resumes, salary data, and proprietary recruitment strategies. DLP solutions can monitor, detect, and block sensitive data from leaving the organization’s network through emails, cloud storage, or even USB drives. Automation in DLP includes flagging unusual data access patterns or automatically encrypting sensitive files, significantly reducing the risk of a data breach.

CRM Data Integrity

CRM Data Integrity refers to the overall completeness, accuracy, and consistency of data stored within your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. For recruiting professionals using CRMs to manage candidates, this means ensuring that applicant profiles are accurate, contact information is up-to-date, and interaction logs are complete. Poor data integrity can lead to ineffective outreach, compliance issues, and wasted recruitment efforts. Automation, through deduplication tools, validation rules, and automated data syncing, is key to maintaining high data integrity, ensuring reliable reporting and effective candidate engagement.

Data Encryption

Data encryption is the process of converting data into a coded format to prevent unauthorized access. In the HR and recruiting world, where sensitive personal employee and candidate data is routinely handled, encryption is a fundamental security measure. This applies to data at rest (stored on servers or in databases) and data in transit (being sent over networks). Employing encryption for all sensitive HR files, communications, and database entries, often automated by secure systems, ensures that even if data is intercepted, it remains unreadable and useless to unauthorized parties, bolstering compliance and privacy.

Immutable Backups

Immutable backups are data backups that cannot be altered, overwritten, or deleted for a specified period. This “write once, read many” approach provides an exceptional defense against ransomware attacks and insider threats, as even an attacker with administrative access cannot corrupt or remove the backup. For HR and recruiting, immutable backups are a cornerstone of resilience, guaranteeing that critical historical employee records, payroll data, and compliance documents remain safe and recoverable, regardless of a primary system compromise. Many modern automated backup solutions offer this crucial feature.

Versioning

Versioning in data management refers to the ability to store and retrieve multiple iterations or versions of a file or data set. For HR and recruiting, this is invaluable for tracking changes in employee contracts, performance reviews, or candidate profiles over time. If an error is introduced or a file is inadvertently changed, versioning allows you to revert to a previous, correct state without losing data. Automated version control in document management systems or cloud storage platforms provides a safety net, ensuring that no critical historical data is ever permanently lost due to updates or modifications.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup is the process of backing up data to an offsite cloud-based server. This eliminates the need for physical backup media or on-premise infrastructure, offering scalability, accessibility, and often enhanced security. For HR and recruiting teams, cloud backup means that sensitive employee and candidate data is stored securely offsite, protected from local disasters. Automated cloud backup solutions ensure continuous data protection, easy recovery from anywhere with internet access, and often come with built-in encryption and redundancy, making it a robust solution for modern HR data management.

On-premise Backup

On-premise backup refers to backing up data to storage devices or servers located within the organization’s own physical premises. While offering direct control over data and faster local recovery times, it is vulnerable to local disasters like fire, flood, or power outages that can affect both primary and backup systems. For some HR departments, specific compliance requirements may necessitate a degree of on-premise storage. A hybrid approach, combining on-premise for rapid local recovery and cloud for offsite disaster recovery, is often adopted to balance control with comprehensive protection, particularly for large or sensitive data sets.

Data Retention Policies

Data Retention Policies are formal guidelines that dictate how long specific types of data should be kept and how they should be disposed of. For HR and recruiting, these policies are critical for legal compliance (e.g., EEOC, GDPR, CCPA requirements), managing storage costs, and mitigating risk. They define how long applicant data, employee records, payroll information, and internal communications must be stored before secure deletion. Automated systems can help enforce these policies, ensuring that data is archived or deleted according to schedule, reducing the burden on HR staff and minimizing legal exposure.

Data Archiving

Data archiving is the process of moving inactive data out of current production systems and storing it in a separate, long-term storage system for compliance, historical record-keeping, or future reference. Unlike backups, which are used for immediate recovery, archives are for data that is no longer actively used but must be retained for legal, regulatory, or business reasons. For HR and recruiting, this includes records of past employees, old job applications, or historical payroll information. Automated archiving solutions ensure efficient storage, easy retrieval when needed, and compliance with data retention policies without cluttering active databases.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Selective Field Restore in Keap: Essential Data Protection for HR & Recruiting with CRM-Backup

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