What you need to know about business data backup services in West Sacramento
For modern companies, data is usually one of their most important assets. In fact, it may be their only asset. This means it’s important to protect it. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup services in West Sacramento.
A data backup is a snapshot of your production data
The term “data backup” is often thrown around incorrectly. It’s particularly likely to be confused with data archiving, especially by people with limited knowledge of IT. For clarity, a data backup is a snapshot of your data at any given moment. It is used so that you can restore from it in the event of data loss, including, but not exclusively in a disaster recovery situation.
A data archive is when specific data is saved for a specific purpose, often compliance. Much of the time, when non-technical users talk about “backing up data” what they actually mean is archiving it. Proper data backups are usually organized by IT staff, either in-house or via an IT services company such as a cloud platform or a business data backup service in West Sacramento.
It’s extremely risky to rely on one data backup
In the consumer world, it may be fine just to have one data backup. In fact, in the consumer world, people may not even bother taking data backups and just rely on archiving specific data. In the business world, however, data backups are beyond vital and it is extremely risky to rely on just one of them. This fact is so widely accepted that the standard approach to managing business data backups is known as the 3-2-1 approach. It means that you need three copies of your data (including your production copy) over two media (including clouds) with one copy held off-site.
This dictum was established in the days of data centers, but it still very much applies in the cloud, albeit with a bit of a twist. With cloud computing, you may have all of your data (production and data backups), technically off-site, as is not on your business premises (assuming you have them), but if all your data is still on one cloud then, off-site or not, you still have all your data eggs in one basket. You need to have a copy in a second cloud in case anything happens to your local one.
You can usually store sensitive data in the public cloud
If you’re in a data center or a private cloud, then you can generally use the public cloud as a place to store your business data backups, even if they contain sensitive data. What you may or may not be able to do is decrypt them in the public cloud so you can work with the data there. That said, it is becoming increasingly common for public clouds to be able to comply with the mainstream data protection laws and compliance programs (including international ones), so the possibility is increasingly likely to be there.
Even if you’re not comfortable using the public cloud as your everyday solution, you might still want to consider it as an option not just for storing your business data backups but also for use as a full disaster recovery solution as it is cost-effective and convenient.
If you’re already in the public cloud, then (hopefully) you’ve checked to see that it’s fine to keep your data there, so it usually makes perfect sense just to use another public cloud as a disaster recovery solution.
You need to move data out of your production systems as it becomes dormant
Most data has a life-cycle. That life-cycle may be short or long (or somewhere in between) but for the most part, data will start in production, then fall dormant. As soon as it falls dormant it needs to be moved swiftly out of your production systems, either through deletion or through archiving, in that order of preference (especially for sensitive data). While this is likely to be an ongoing process, it should also be a “set-and-forget” process (or more accurately a “set-and-review-periodically” process) to ensure that it actually happens.
The reason this is important is that data backups are an exact snapshot of your production data. It, therefore, follows that if your production systems are clogged up with excess data, then not only will you be paying excess storage costs for your production system, but you will also be paying extra storage costs for your online data backups too (plus increased data transfer charges).
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced business data backup services provider in West Sacramento, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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