Business Data Backup Davis

What you need to know about business data backup in Davis

It was only a few decades ago that even corporations kept their data on a combination of paper and floppy disks. Those days are long gone. These days, even the smallest of SMBs probably has far too much data to fit on a floppy disk (if they could still find one). What’s more some of that data is going to have legal implications. For all these reasons (and many more) a good business data backup strategy is a must. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Davis.

For most SMBs online data backups are the only way to go 

If you’re still running a data center, then you might want to take one data backup on physical storage but even in a data center, you’re probably going to want another one in the cloud. If you’re already in the cloud, then cloud to cloud data backups are really the only way to go.

Data backups should usually be held in encrypted form 

A data backup is a snapshot of your production data. This means that it’s probably going to hold sensitive data, data with legal implications and data you’d prefer to keep confidential for commercial reasons. There’s a good chance that you’ll be under a legal obligation to protect at least some of this data (e.g. sensitive data). It is usually solid business sense to protect all of it.

If you’re in a data center or a private cloud, it should be fairly straightforward to encrypt the data on your own servers. If you’re in the public cloud, by contrast, it can be a bit more of a challenge. It is, however, worth making the effort. There are two reasons for this.

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First of all, in the public cloud, data security is a shared responsibility. If your accesses are misused (even by accident) or compromised and your data is deleted as a result, then that is your problem. Admittedly having a second copy of your data elsewhere isn’t complete protection against data loss, nothing is. It is, however, an excellent safeguard, assuming that you apply the appropriate security precautions to protect the storage location.

Secondly, while public cloud providers have a solid track record of keeping their services running, nothing is guaranteed. Having a copy of your data in a second cloud gives you the basis of a disaster recovery solution, or, in simpler terms, a Plan B.

Sensitive data and public clouds

You can usually hold sensitive data in a public cloud. It just needs to be kept encrypted and, of course, you need to apply standard security precautions such as limiting access and using two-factor authentication.

What you may not be able to do is decrypt your data in a public cloud so you can work with it there, for example in a disaster recovery situation. It is, however, increasingly likely that you can, even if you’re in a regulated industry. This means that, even if you’re not comfortable using a public cloud as your everyday working environment, you might want to look into the possibility of using it not just to store your business data backups, but also as a full cloud disaster recovery solution.

The business data backup process starts in your production system

If your production system is full of active, necessary, clean data, stored appropriately, then your business data backups should run smoothly and sweetly. At least they have a better chance of doing so. If, by contrast, your production system is clogged up with dormant, irrelevant and dirty data, stored in the wrong way, then you’re effectively just setting yourself up for trouble with your business data backups.

As an absolute minimum, you should be able to identify any sensitive data and any data required for compliance purposes (there will probably be some crossover here) and make sure that it is appropriately protected and stored up to the end of its life-cycle. At this point, sensitive data must be deleted (this is usually a legal requirement and even if it’s not, it’s a very good idea). Other data may be deleted and this is strongly recommended to reduce both costs and your exposure to security risks.

All other data should be purged from your systems in general, in other words, it should be neither in production nor in a data backup nor in an archive. If, however, there are people who are desperate to keep it, then you could compromise by downloading it to an offline storage device. This would keep it available without running up cloud storage costs.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced business data backup services provider in Davis, please click here now to contact Salient IT.