Business Data Backup Elk Grove

Business Data Backup Elk Grove2020-05-05T09:33:34+00:00

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A quick guide to business data backup in Elk Grove

The importance of business data backups has now been recognized for years, if not decades. Many of the principles behind them have remained much the same for most, if not all, of that time. The arrival of the cloud, however, requires a more strategic approach. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to business data backup in Elk Grove.

You need to exercise rigorous oversight of your data 

While there are some SMBs run on-site clouds (or even data centers), it’s more common for IT infrastructure to be off-site and often managed by a third-party. In the absence of on-site infrastructure and dedicated off-site storage facilities for physical media, the only way to keep control of your data is through rigorous protocols and rigorous controls to ensure that these protocols are being followed.

At the end of the day, quite bluntly, any control system is only as good as the enforcement behind it. This means that you want to keep your data close to home and work with local IT services vendors. For practical purposes “local” can be defined as “operating under the same legal system”.

It pays to understand your data in detail 

In the days of data centers, it was perfectly common for companies to back up all of their data at the same time to the same type of storage. In fact, they might even use the same type of storage for data backups as they did for data archives. In theory, this wasn’t particularly cost-effective. In practice, the cost-savings achieved by making bulk purchases could make it worthwhile.

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For cloud-native and cloud-first companies, however, this sort of approach will make your finance team weep. In the cloud, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. This is a great incentive to get smart about how you use it and that starts with knowing your data in detail.

You can store sensitive data in public clouds 

Knowing your data typically starts with being able to identify and track sensitive data. You need this to be deleted as soon as it has served the purpose for which it was collected. This is increasingly likely to be a legal requirement and even if it’s not, then it’s a security best practice.


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You do not, however, necessarily have to split out sensitive data if you want to store your off-site data backups in a public cloud so you can benefit from the cost-effectiveness it offers. Even if you’re in a regulated industry, it’s usually enough to keep the data encrypted unless the public cloud you’re using can demonstrate compliance with the relevant data protection laws and compliance programs.

This is increasingly likely and could be well worth double-checking if you’re looking for a budget-friendly disaster recovery solution.

You can use different speeds of storage for different types of data 

In the cloud, the fastest storage is the most expensive and vice versa. It, therefore, makes sense always to use the slowest storage you reasonably can. The key word, of course, is “reasonably”. Obviously, you need to stop short of doing anything which is going to upset your users, but there’s usually some room to maneuver.

One of the most important points to remember about the cloud is that little differences add up. This means that dialing back on the storage speed, by even a tiny amount that users may not even notice, can generate major savings over the longer term.

You can then use the storage speeds in your production system to inform the Recovery Time Objectives for your online data backups (of which there should usually be two). This will then feed through to the storage you use for your online data backups.

You can set different RPOs for different types of data 

Your Recovery Point Objective defines how often data needs to be backed up. As a rule of thumb, the more frequently data is updated, the more frequently it needs to be backed up and vice versa. It pays to fine-tune this because the frequency of your business data backups will influence how much bandwidth you use and hence feed into your costs.

It’s important to move dormant data swiftly out of your production systems 

Just moving dormant data into slower storage is not enough (although it’s certainly better than nothing). Your production systems should only contain active data, i.e. data that is actually being used. If you allow dormant data to hang around, then not only will you be paying extra storage costs (across three environments) and extra bandwidth, but you will also be increasing the time needed both to back up your data and to recover from your business data backups.

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

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