Business Data Backup Woodland 

What you need to know about business data backup in Woodland

Just as a small drop of water can create a ripple effect so a brief loss of access to your data can have a major impact on your productivity. Permanent loss of access to your data could be catastrophic to your business. Fortunately, you can prevent this with an effective business data backup plan. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Woodland.

You want to minimize the data you hold 

These days, there are all kinds of reasons for minimizing the data you hold. Even if you’re (still) working in a data center, you have to recognize the fact that a lot of data carries some level of security risk. The more data you hold, the higher your level of risk. Additionally, the more data you hold, the more resources you need to manage it. This is a relatively small issue in data centers but a major one in the cloud where there is a very direct link between consumption and costs. In the case of business data backups, the main costs are storage and bandwidth.

You generally need two, separate data backups 

In the days of data centers, people operated on the 3-2-1 approach. This meant three copies of your data, including your production data, over two media, with one copy being kept off-site. These days, even data centers tend to use the cloud to hold their off-site copy. The internet is now reliable enough to be the preferred option for transporting data, especially in urban areas such as Woodland, where road traffic is far more likely to be an issue than internet traffic.

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In the cloud, the 3-2-1 approach still holds good, provided that you realize that “local” and “off-site” mean practically rather than physically. For example, your local cloud is the one you use for your everyday work. It’s, therefore, your “on-site” location even if the infrastructure is located somewhere other than your main business premises. It’s generally a very good idea to keep a business data backup in your usual cloud, but it’s still highly advisable to have a second one in a completely separate cloud as your “off-site” location.

The public cloud is generally the best place for your off-site business data backup 

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but the key point to note is that, even if you’re in a regulated industry, you generally can at least store your business data backups in a public cloud. You may even be able to decrypt your data and work with it in the public cloud.

The reason why you can store sensitive data in a public cloud is that you can encrypt it on your own servers before sending it through the internet. You would then just keep it encrypted until it was either retrieved or deleted.

Rather ironically, the encryption process can be easier for organizations working private clouds (and data centers) than for organizations working in public clouds. Public-cloud users should, however, make the effort to deal with this and a good business data backup vendor will be able to help. Remember that public cloud vendors only protect their platform against external threats. They do not protect against a particular user’s access being used to delete data by accident (or malice).

Business data backups and disaster recovery 

It is important to understand that a business data backup is necessary for disaster recovery but it is not sufficient by itself. You need to add anything required to work with the data, such as an operating system and applications.

If you’re already working in the public cloud, then the public cloud is the obvious place both to hold your business data backups and act as your disaster recovery solution.

If you’re in a private cloud (or a data center), then it may still be feasible for you to use a public cloud purely as a disaster recovery solution. The major platforms are increasingly likely to comply with the mainstream data protection laws and compliance programs (including international ones such as GDPR).

If it is technically feasible then you would have to weigh up the benefit of having full control over your environment by running a second private cloud (or data center), versus the benefit of reducing your costs (often significantly) by using a public cloud. You may find that the sums work very differently for a disaster recovery solution (which you are only likely to use for short periods) than for your everyday system.

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