The concept of backing up external data is not new; until now it is only available for corporate institutions with several locations, high connection speeds and very high budgets. Today, the cost of high-speed equipment and connections has dropped significantly, leading to a significant increase in the number of companies offering remote backup. For conversational purposes, we can call jumping on the bandwagon.
You may think that increased competition is good for consumers, and I agree to a certain extent, but not for cutting corners and jeopardizing your data security. We all know and agree that data is a company's most important asset, and losing or accessing such assets is not an option. So please be careful where you store your data.
The general opinion about offsite backup is good because it has a very low proportional implementation cost and because the right system should be fully automated, the cost of ownership is also very low. Unlike tape backup, it is very scalable, you can start small and grow to a bigger solution, and if you need it with zero interruption, you should be with the right backup company first.
A small company in a modern data center can have several servers, for example a server for Microsoft Exchange / Lotus Notes, a server for Microsoft SQL / Oracle / MySQL and possibly a file and print server, or a single server. Smaller companies may use legacy Unix or systems or consider moving to a cheaper Linux environment. Your external backup solution should adapt to what you use now or may use in the future. Check which backup company you use to make sure they continue to improve their products for your company in the future.
Getting offsite data is easy, anyone can click and drag to the ftp site, it will optimize your backup and more importantly your recovery times will ensure your data is compressed locally or at the source. The most important element of data transfer is security, make sure your data is encrypted and stored before sending, otherwise only your organization can access your data.
In what environment is your data stored? There is no point in moving your most important assets, make sure they are safe, data should only be backed up to a Class 1 data center with the highest safety and security measures, devices should be integrated. One point of failure in the data center, and for additional security and convenience, all data centers and equipment should not be moved in real-time to a second location in another country.
Imagine having your local data backed up every night or transferred to a second data center in another country in real-time whenever you want to be safely away in the UK.
Ultimately, this whole process should be as efficient as possible. It should be fully secure, fully automated your staff can focus on revenue-generating functions, support open files that allow you to back up anything your system does, and have additional backups because there's no point - sending existing files.
So after reading this article, I hope you think and understand why the cheapest external backup solutions are so rare.
You must be logged in to post a comment.