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A quick guide to business data backup services in Auburn
These days, data is vital to just about every aspect of business. It’s used by everyone from front-line staff such as delivery drivers and customer service agents to the C-suite. Data is now so important that losing access to it, even temporarily can hurt a lot. Losing access to it permanently could sink a business. That’s why all businesses, even SMBs, need a solid business data backup strategy. With that in mind, here a quick guide to business data backup services in Auburn.
For the most part, you probably want to use the public cloud
You can store sensitive data in a public cloud. It may need to be kept encrypted, but that shouldn’t be an issue, because you would need to encrypt it anyway before sending it through the public internet. This means that regardless of your standard working environment, the public cloud is usually the most practical option for storing your online business data backups.
Data centers and public clouds
If you’re in a data center, then you may still want to take your local data backup to physical media. You are presumably able to store it safely on-site. Even in a data center, however, it generally makes sense to use the cloud for your off-site data backup and since you’re presumably not going to be running a private cloud, then the public cloud is the only way to go.
Private clouds and public clouds
If you’re in a private cloud, then you could store your online data backups in a second private cloud and this may be the right option for some companies. In short, if you need to recover from a disaster at maximum speed and you absolutely must be in the private cloud, then it would make sense to store your business data backups in your disaster recovery cloud so that you just need to decrypt them there and get back into productivity.
If, however, you can wait a little for your data or at least for part of your data, then using the public cloud to store your online data backups is likely to be the more economical option. You may even be able to use the public cloud as a disaster recovery solution as the main public cloud providers are increasingly likely to be compliant with major data protection laws and compliance programs (including international ones such as GDPR).
This means that even if you’re not comfortable using the public cloud as your main working location, it could still operate as a convenient and cost-effective disaster recovery solution.
Public clouds and public clouds
If you’re already in the public cloud, then using another public cloud will probably be your only reasonable option. Undertaking cloud-to-cloud business data backups from one public cloud to another is actually more challenging than it may sound, due to the need to encrypt and decrypt the data in the public cloud where you will not have access to the physical servers. It is, however, possible and you do need a genuinely off-site business data backup.
Remember that a public cloud provider only secures their platform against external threats. If you delete your data by accident (or your access is compromised and a malicious actor deletes it), then that is on you to remedy. It’s also worth noting that even the biggest public cloud providers can have outages, so it’s always useful to have a Plan B.
Data backups versus data archives
In the world of data centers, there was a very clear difference between data backups and data archives. Data backups were snapshots of your production data, used to recover from issues such as accidental deletions. Data archives were places to hold data that needed to be saved for a specific purpose, such as compliance.
This is still essentially the case in the world of the cloud, but the cloud offers much more scope for fine-tuning how data is managed. First of all, data items will generally have a life cycle and this life-cycle will vary according to the type of data. Some data items may start in production and then just become dormant overnight whereas others may just gradually fade out of use or have seasonal use.
When data does become dormant, sometimes it needs to be deleted straight away and sometimes it needs to be archived until it can be deleted. It’s even possible that some data may be archived until it is brought back into use in production, such as seasonal data.
What all this means in practice is that in the cloud it often makes a great deal of sense to think about what speed of storage you are using for any given data item at any given point in its lifecycle and to replicate that speed in the storage you use for your online data backups.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced business data backup services provider in Auburn, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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