Cloud Data Backup Auburn

A quick guide to cloud data backup in Auburn

Given that most SMBs in Auburn are now very much cloud-first (some will even be cloud-native), it usually makes sense to use cloud to cloud data backups. These work along very similar principles to traditional data backups, but there are some nuances it is important to understand. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to cloud data backup in Auburn.

The traditional 3-2-1 strategy still holds good

In essence, you still want to have three copies of your data (i.e. your production copy and two data backups) over two media with one copy kept off-site. The twist is that instead of holding data across two physical media, you hold them across two clouds. Your main cloud is counted as your on-site location and your secondary cloud is counted as your off-site location.

Simply backing up your data to your usual cloud is not sufficient protection, because it leaves you exposed if anything happens to that cloud. It also leaves you exposed in case of erroneous deletion (accidental or deliberate).

Sensitive data can often be stored in the public cloud, even if it can’t be worked there 

All the standard data-protection rules still apply in the cloud. What’s more, they apply to you not your platforms or your IT services vendors. This means that the onus is on you to choose your platforms and IT services vendors carefully and to exercise appropriate oversight of both. To facilitate this, it’s strongly recommended to stick with mainstream cloud platforms and cloud data backup vendors in Auburn, or at least near Auburn, rather than cloud data backup vendors who offer services in Auburn but who are located elsewhere.

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Having said that, it is usually possible to store sensitive data in a public cloud provided that you encrypt it on your own servers first and keep it encrypted until it is back on your own servers again (or deleted). This means that you can generally use the public cloud as a cost-effective way to store data backups, but you may not be able to use it as a full disaster-recovery solution.

If you went down this route, you would need to make sure that your cloud data backup storage location had import/export access both to your main cloud and to your disaster-recovery cloud so that you can keep all your data in sync. Remember that you will need to use the data from your disaster-recovery cloud to update your main cloud as part of post-event recovery.

In the cloud, there is a direct link between robust data management and cost control 

In the old days, you paid for a physical storage device and it was then entirely up to you how full you filled it. In principle, the more capacity you bought, the more you paid. In practice, physical storage has been priced very affordably for many years, so there was no real financial incentive for companies to govern their general data as robustly as they governed their sensitive data.

In the cloud, however, the more you use, the more you pay – and vice versa. This means that the better you manage your data, the lower your costs will be.

As an absolute minimum, you need to be able to identify what data is in production and what is dormant. You only want to back up the former. Backing up the latter will not only increase your costs for storage and bandwidth but will also increase the time it takes to back up the data and, possibly more importantly, the time it takes to restore the data.

Ideally, you then want to split the dormant data into data that is required for compliance reasons and data which is not. The former needs to be archived, the latter should be claimed (and given an owner) or deleted. In the real world, however, that may not be as straightforward as it sounds, in which case the pragmatic approach is often to archive all of it until the longest compliance deadline has passed and if nobody has complained about its absence by that point, just delete it.

Remember your plan A is still to avoid the need to recover your data at all 

There are several good reasons for minimizing the need to use your cloud data backups for recovery purposes. Most of them revolve around two key facts. Firstly, recovery itself costs money (many cloud data backup vendors charge a fee per recovery plus there are bandwidth costs) and it involves downtime, which also costs money in lost productivity. In other words, your plan A should be to keep your infrastructure running sweetly and if this is too much for your in-house IT ops team (or you don’t have one), managed IT services can help.

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