The concept of offsite data backup is not new; some time ago, it was only available to enterprise institutions that had multiple locations, high connection speeds, and very high budgets. Nowadays, the cost of hardware and high-speed connections have come down significantly, as a result of which the number of companies offering remote backup has increased significantly. For conversational purposes, we can call it jumping on the bandwagon.
You may think that increased competition is good for consumers to some extent, I agree, but not at the cost of restrictions and compromising the security of your data. We all know and agree that a company's data is its most important asset, and losing or making such an asset available to competitors is never an option. So be careful where you store your data.
The general idea of offsite backup is a good one, after all it has a very low proportional cost of implementation and since a proper system should be fully automated, the cost of ownership is also very low. Unlike tape backup, it is also very scalable, you can start small and grow to larger solutions as needed with zero interruption, but first and foremost you need to be with the right external backup company.
In today's data-centric environment, even smaller companies may have more than one server, such as a Microsoft Exchange/Lotus Notes server, a Microsoft SQL/Oracle/MySQL server, and possibly a file and print server, or perhaps one server that does all the work. Smaller companies may still use older, legacy Unix- or Novell-based systems, or may consider migrating to a less expensive Linux environment. Regardless of what you currently use or may use in the future, your offsite backup solution will need to adapt. Please check which backup company you use, make sure they are always developing their products for the future, the future of your companies.
Getting the data to another location is a piece of cake, anyone can click and drag to the ftp server to optimize backups and more importantly restore times, make sure your data is compressed locally or at the source. The most important element of any data transfer is security, make sure your data is encrypted before transfer and stays encrypted during storage if only your organization can access it.
What environment is your data stored in? There is no point in just moving your most important asset to another location, make sure it is completely secure, data should only be backed up to a class 1 data center with the highest security measures, hardware should be clustered so that no single point of failure in that data center and for added security and peace of mind, the entire data center and hardware should be replicated in real-time to a second location, preferably in another country.
Imagine having your local data backed up nightly or whenever you want to a secure remote location in the UK and then replicated in real-time to a second data center in another country.
Ultimately, this entire process must be as efficient as possible. It has to be completely secure, fully automated to ensure your staff can focus on revenue generating functions, it has to support open files to allow you to back up no matter what your systems are doing, and it has to allow incremental backups, after all it doesn't make sense re-transfer a file that has not been accessed for a year.
So now after reading this article I hope it has made you think and understand why the cheapest offsite backup solution is rarely the best.
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