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What you need to know about business data backup in Lodi
In the early days of IT, backing up your data meant copying it from your hard drive onto two floppy disks, keeping one disk at your desk and putting the other one in an office cupboard. That’s essentially the 3-2-1 approach which is still very much in use today. These days, however, even SMBs have a whole lot more data to manage and so need to use a more strategic approach. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Lodi.
The public cloud is usually the sensible place to hold your off-site data backups
Your local business data backup will, by definition, be to your local environment. This means that you only have to take an active decision about where you are going to store your off-site data backup. Regardless of what working environment you generally use, the public cloud is normally the most sensible option simply because it is usually the most cost-effective option.
Even if you’re in a regulated industry, you can usually store sensitive data in a public cloud, although you may have to keep it encrypted. Then again, you may not because it is increasingly common for public clouds to be compliant with major data protection laws and compliance programs. This may not be enough to tempt you into the public cloud as an everyday option, but it could be enough to make it worth investigating as a disaster-recovery option.
You do need an off-site data backup
Rather ironically, cloud-to-cloud data backups from one public cloud to another can be more technically-challenging than cloud-to-cloud data backups from a private cloud (or a data center) to a public cloud. This is because you need to encrypt the data before you send it over the public internet and this can be a bit more difficult in the public-cloud environment than in environments where you have full control over the servers. It is, however, worth making the effort.
Remember that in the public cloud, security is a shared responsibility. The public cloud vendor protects its own perimeter and secures the invisible walls between the different clients (or tenants). Clients have to secure their own accesses against misuse, be that through accident or compromise. In other words, if your data is deleted as a result of your own actions, then that is entirely your responsibility, nothing to do with your cloud vendor.
This is the main reason for having an off-site business data backup even if you’re working with a public cloud provider whom you expect to secure their systems. The other reason is that even the biggest and best public cloud providers can have outages and having an off-site data backup in a second public cloud gives you a straightforward route to a full disaster recovery solution.
With private clouds (and data centers), it’s all on you so the need for an off-site data backup becomes even more evident.
You need to maintain oversight of your data
If you run your own infrastructure on-site, then you will literally be able to see everything that’s going on with it. Likewise, if you take your off-site business data backup to physical storage and transport it to an off-site storage location, you will literally be able to see what happens to it. These days, however, there are very few businesses doing either, especially not SMBs, and the number is shrinking all the time.
Most companies, particularly SMBs, are likely to have their infrastructure off-site, probably managed by an IT services vendor such as a managed hosting vendor (or in the public cloud). This means that you have to replace physical oversight with robust systems and processes, backed by robust enforcement practices.
Remember that you are responsible for your data, not your IT services vendors. This means that if anything happens to your data, you will be the one who is pursued by law-enforcement/compliance regulators. This means that you need to have robust and enforceable service contracts in place to ensure that any IT service vendors you use are required to fulfill your legal obligations and that you can effectively seek redress from them if they do not.
In short, therefore, even though the internet is global, when it comes to protecting your data, the safest option by far, especially for SMBs, is usually to stick with local services and local IT services providers. For clarity, in this context “local” essentially means “working under the same legal system as you” or, if you want to put the matter even more bluntly “answerable to the same courts as you”.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced business data backup services provider in Lodi, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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