Cloud Data Backup Placerville

A quick guide to cloud data backup in Placerville

The basic principles of data backups are much the same regardless of how you do them. The practicalities, however, can vary somewhat, depending on what specific data backup method you use. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to cloud data backup in Placerville.

If you’re in a data center or a private cloud you can still (usually) back up to a public cloud

If you’re in a data center, there may still be a case for backing up to a physical device so that you have a local copy of your data. There are, however, a lot of advantages to using a cloud for your off-site copy. Many of these advantages revolve around the fact that using cloud data backup eliminates the need to transport physical media to, and, possibly more importantly, from an off-site storage location. This can do wonders for your recovery time objective.

If you’re in a private cloud, then all your data is online anyway, so it is arguably counterproductive to keep your backups on physical media. Realistically, cloud to cloud backups are generally the only way to go. Usually, you can export sensitive data to a public cloud as long as you encrypt it on your own servers first and keep it encrypted until it is either used or deleted. This can be a very cost-effective approach, but it does mean that you need a separate disaster-recovery solution, which also needs access to your data backups.

If you’re in a public cloud you will have specific technical challenges to manage

Backing up from one public cloud to another is certainly possible, in fact, it’s done all the time. It does, however, often bring some specific technical challenges. Essentially, even if you are comfortable having data in the clear on a public cloud platform, you will probably want it encrypted as it passes through the public internet.

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You will therefore need to encrypt it in one cloud before transmitting it through the internet. You will also need to be able to decrypt the data in the second cloud if you want to use it as a complete disaster-recovery solution. Then you will need to be able to manage this process in reverse so you can recover your data to your main public cloud.

If this sounds like a bit too much of a challenge for you, then the good news is that a reputable cloud data backup provider should be able to take care of it for you.

All the usual data-protection requirements apply to cloud data backups 

In principle this should go without saying, but, it’s so important it’s worth highlighting on its own. The key point to take away is that legally and ethically the responsibility for protecting data in the cloud lies with the data owner, not with the cloud platform nor with any IT  services partners.

This means that you need to protect your data (and yourselves) by selecting your platforms and partners very carefully and making sure that they have adequate and appropriate supervision. As a result, it is usually advisable to give strong preference to cloud data backup partners in Placerville, or at least near Placerville, rather than cloud data backup partners who offer services in Placerville but who are actually located elsewhere.

In the cloud, there is a direct link between consumption and cost 

When you backup data to physical devices, you pay upfront for the device and the cost remains the same regardless of how much data they hold. Given that storage has been priced very affordably for many years, there has been little financial incentive for businesses to reduce the volume of non-sensitive data they hold.

In the cloud, by contrast, you pay for what you use. This means there is a very strong financial incentive to extend robust data governance to your general data. As an absolute minimum, you should be able to identify what data is being used actively and what data is lying dormant. You only want to back up the former. The latter should either be archived (put into long-term storage) or deleted.

Ideally, you should only archive data you are sure you need (e.g. for compliance purposes), but if you cannot identify what data is genuinely needed versus what data is just there because nobody wants to be the person who deletes it, then put it all into archive until the longest relevant compliance deadline has passed (and if nobody has complained by that point, that is a strong argument in favor of just deleting it).

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