Offsite Data Backup | Be Very careful who you deal with!

Offsite data backup services are currently provided by a large number of businesses. Please don’t select your supplier just purely on price. Keep in mind that your company’s most valuable asset is your data.

Offsite data backup is not a new idea; in the past, it was only accessible to corporate institutions with numerous sites, fast internet, and large budgets. The price of hardware and high-speed connectivity has significantly decreased nowadays, which has led to a significant rise in the number of businesses offering backup to remote locations. For conversational purposes, we can refer to it as joining the crowd.

You may agree with me that there is some benefit to consumers from increased competition, but not at the expense of compromising the security of your data. We can all agree that a company’s data is its most valuable asset, thus losing it or granting access to your rivals is never an option. Be careful where you save your info, please.

Offsite backup is an excellent concept overall since it has a very low relative implementation cost and a very low cost of ownership because the right solution should be fully automated. In contrast to tape backup, it is also very scalable. You can start small and upgrade to larger solutions as needed without experiencing any downtime, but you must work with the correct offsite backup provider initially.

In today’s data centric environment even smaller companies may have more than one server, just for example a server for Microsoft Exchange/Lotus Notes, a server for Microsoft SQL/Oracle/MySQL and potentially a file and print server, or maybe a single server which carries out all tasks.  Smaller companies may still use older inherited Unix based or Novell based systems or may be considering migrating to a lower cost Linux environment.  Whet ever you currently use or what you may use in the future your offsite backup solution will need to adapt.  Please check, what ever backup company you use, make sure they are always developing their products for the future, your companies future.

 

The simple part of moving data to an offsite location is clicking and dragging it to an ftp site. However, compressing your data locally or at the source can optimize your backup and, more crucially, your recovery times. Security is the most crucial component of any data transfer. If your data is encrypted before being transmitted and is kept encrypted while being stored, only your organization will have access to it.

What kind of setting is your data saved in? Make sure your most valuable asset is completely safe before moving it. Data should only be backed up to class 1 data centers with the highest levels of security and safety in place. Hardware should be clustered so there is no single point of failure within that data center. For additional security and peace of mind, the entire data center and all of its hardware should be a replicated in real time to a second location, preferably another country.

Imagine having your local data replicated in real-time to a second data center in a different nation after being backed up locally every night or whenever you choose to a secure distant site in the UK.

The efficiency of the entire process must be maximized. It must be completely secure, fully automated, support open files so you can backup regardless of what your systems are doing, and it must be able to perform incremental backups because there is no point in re-transmitting a file that hasn’t been accessed in a year. All of these requirements ensure that your staff is focused on tasks that generate revenue.

So after reading this article I now hope it has made you think and understand why the cheapest offsite backup solution is rarely the best.

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