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A quick guide to data backup services in Davis
While cash-flow may be the lifeblood of all businesses, especially SMBs, data plays a large role in keeping that cash flowing. Modern businesses need access to their data to function, hence, any loss of access to it reduces productivity and thus revenue. This is a strong argument for a robust data backup strategy. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to data backup services in Davis.
You must keep the law in mind at all times
Obviously, this applies to everything you do in life as in business. In business, however, particularly when it comes to data management, even companies with the highest ethics and the best of intentions can end up sliding onto the wrong side of the law by oversight rather than malice. This is why you need a clear process for keeping on top of updates to all relevant laws (and compliance programs) as well as processes (preferably automated ones) to ensure that your data is always managed in compliance with those laws/regulations.
In particular, you will need a process for identifying sensitive data items and managing them through their life-cycle. Specifically, you will need to identify when they have ceased to be needed for production and ensure that they are then either deleted or archived for the correct length of time and then deleted immediately the compliance deadline has passed. You will also need a process for identifying data that is not sensitive but does need to be kept for compliance purposes and ensuring that this data is either held in production or correctly archived.
Always remember that legally and ethically you are responsible for the data items you own (or which are lent to you by data subjects). You can delegate tasks to data backup services vendors, but you cannot delegate legal accountability to them. What you can and must do, however, is set up robust contracts, which oblige any IT services vendors you use (including your data backup services vendor) to honor your legal obligations.
Remember, however, that in the real world, contracts only have meaning if they are actually enforceable in practice rather than just in theory. For the most part, therefore, it’s advisable to stick with local IT services vendors, who operate under the same legal framework as you.
It’s strongly advisable to purge dormant data from your production systems
In a data center environment, you can often get away with allowing expired (non-sensitive) data to linger around your production systems, at least up to a certain point. It does have an impact on both costs and performance, but the impact is often less obviously perceptible than it is in the cloud. The reason for this is that in data centers you buy storage and fill it or not as you choose, whereas in the cloud you pay for exactly what you use.
If you’re really not comfortable deleting data (and you’re sure that you’re legally entitled to keep it), then at the very least move it into a data archive where it will be out of the scope of your data backups and in slower storage, which is much more affordable. This will have the bonus of reducing the amount of bandwidth you need for your data backups, which reduces both time and cost.
In the cloud, you can define different RPOs and RTOs for different kinds of data
Recovery Point Objectives define how long you go between data backups and Recovery Time Objectives define how quickly you need your data back online. In a data center environment, it’s usually impractical to have more than one RPO and RTO, but in a cloud environment, it’s not only usually practical, it’s often very desirable. In short, finessing your RPOs and RTOs can help you to focus your resources on your most critical data making sure that it is backed up most frequently and restored most quickly.
This allows your staff to resume essential tasks with the minimum possible delay even if they have to wait a while before they get access to lower-priority data.
Remember that bandwidth matters as well as storage
In principle, all companies should undertake full data backups all the time. In practice, however, this is way too much even for corporations and certainly for SMBs. Instead, you generally want to combine full data backups with incremental data backups (which backup only data which has changed since the last data backup) and/or differential backups (which backup only data which has changed since the last full data backup). You might also want to look at using compression to minimize your file sizes, but be careful to avoid overdoing this and damaging file quality.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup services provider in Davis, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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