Data Backup Services Auburn 

What you need to know about data backup services in Auburn

For some modern businesses, analyzing data is, literally, what they do. For many modern businesses, access to data is a necessity for them to be able to function. In either case, losing access to data, even temporarily, can result in lost productivity, which will ultimately translate into lost money. Fortunately, these business threats can be substantially reduced with a robust data backup strategy. With that in mind, here’s what you need to know about data backup services in Auburn.

Generally, the 3-2-1 strategy holds good

The 3-2-1 strategy has been practiced for years. As a recap, according to this strategy you keep three copies of your data (including your production copy), over two media (including cloud platforms, with one copy being kept off-site (in a second cloud). The local copy was mainly for dealing with local incidents, e.g. accidental deletions and the off-site copy was mainly for disaster recovery.

Although recent events have really brought home the importance of having a robust disaster-recovery strategy, remember that there is a big difference between being prepared and panicking. If you’re still taking your off-site data backup to physical storage, then you could potentially make an argument for taking extra copies of it “just in case”, but you could almost certainly make an even stronger argument for storing your off-site data backup in the cloud, which would make it accessible to you remotely regardless of where your staff members are working.

Remember that each data backup you take not only increases costs but also increases your exposure to data theft. That’s a strong argument in favor of resisting any temptation to “stockpile” data backups to ensure your own protection.

Most of the time your off-site data backups should go in the cloud 

You’ll take your local backup to your local environment. These days, that is increasingly likely to be the cloud anyway, especially for modern SMBs, but if you’re still running a data center, then you’ll presumably have plenty of physical storage devices plus the facilities to keep them safe.

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These days, however, your off-site backup should almost always be taken to the cloud, so you have the best possible chance of being able to access it in your time of need. Even though the internet can have outages, which was one of the initial concerns about using the cloud for data backups, at this point, it is massively reliable. In fact, these days it is probably far less likely that there will be an issue with the internet than that there will be an issue with the roads, especially in urban areas such as Auburn and most especially in a general disaster situation (as opposed to a disaster event which only impacts the company).

Managing your data effectively pays dividends in all environments 

First of all, you need to ensure that your data is managed in a way that complies with both the law and any data protection programs you need to follow. All sensitive data is likely to be under legal/compliance requirements and some general data will also come under compliance requirements (for example tax-related data).

Always remember that if law-enforcers/compliance regulators believe that there is an issue with how your data has been managed, they will take it up with you, not your IT services vendors. How much trouble you get into will probably depend largely on the extent to which you have tried to protect your data.

How much of the expense of this you will be able to recoup from your IT services vendors will probably depend largely on the robustness of your contract, which includes your ability to enforce it in the real world, rather than just in theory. This is much easier if you stick with local vendors as it means you will both be under the same legal system.

Secondly, anything you can do to reduce the volume of data you back up will increase the efficiency of your data back up process, reduce your costs and speed up your time to recovery. This has three key implications.

First of all, you want to exercise good “data hygiene” on what goes into your production systems. For example, minimize what you collect, insist on standardized formatting and actively look for duplicates. Secondly, you need to be rigorous about purging data from your production systems. Any dormant data should be either deleted or moved into an archive until it must/can be deleted.

Thirdly, you need to think carefully about the types of data backups you take (full, incremental or differential) and consider using compression astutely to minimize the amount of bandwidth you need.

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