Data Backup Services Elk Grove 

What you need to know about data backup services in Elk Grove

An effective data backup strategy allows you to recover quickly from incidents that interrupt your access to your data. It also keeps costs low enough to be manageable even for SMBs on a tight budget. The good news is that this is perfectly achievable, with a bit of knowledge, discipline, and planning. With that in mind, here is what you need to know about data backup services in Elk Grove.

The law applies to data backups (and archives) in the same way as production data 

If you are holding sensitive data, then you need to ensure that it is appropriately protected throughout its entire life-cycle. You will also need to protect data that is not legally considered sensitive (i.e. personal) but is still required for legal purposes (such as tax-related data). Legally, and ethically, this responsibility lies with you, not your IT services vendors. Hence, for your own protection, you need to choose your IT services vendors very carefully and make sure that there is a complete and enforceable service contract in place.

In legal terms, an enforceable contract means one which will stand up in court. In practical terms, an enforceable contract is one in which a court judgment has real-world implications. For example, if a court orders one party to pay damages to the other, that party can be forced to do so. Both of these aims are much easier to achieve if you stick to local vendors, who operate under the same legal system and hence come under the jurisdiction of the same courts.

For the sake of completeness, this approach can also ensure protection for data which may not be of interest to the law, but which is very relevant to your business and which you would prefer to keep confidential.

You can usually store sensitive data in a public cloud 

It is almost always possible to use the public cloud as a storage location for data backups. They just need to be encrypted on your own servers first. This can be a useful approach to ensuring legal compliance without going to the expense of running a second private cloud all the time.

The better you manage your data, the better you can manage your costs

Most companies stick with the long-established 3-2-1 approach. That’s three copies of your data (including your production copy) over two media, with one copy being kept in an off-site location. These days, however, most SMBs will be working wholly or mainly in the cloud, which means that their local backup will be taken to that cloud. Even companies that still run data centers are very likely to use the cloud for their off-site data backup and companies which are already in the cloud will almost certainly do so as there’s unlikely to be any other sensible option.

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One of the big differences between data centers and the cloud is that in data centers a lot of the expenses were upfront, for example, the purchase of physical storage, so once you had it you could go on using it as much or as little as you wanted without incurring any further costs. In the cloud, by contrast, you pay for exactly what you use. This means that the more you do to minimize the volume of data you keep in production, the more you can reduce your costs.

As an absolute minimum, you should be purging data from production as soon as it becomes dormant. Ideally, it should be deleted but if this is not possible, it should be archived until it must/can be deleted. You should also be doing everything possible to minimize the quantity of data you collect and to ensure that every data item is accurate and in a standardized format.

Fine-tuning your objectives can also help to keep costs down 

The success of data backups is defined by two main criteria namely Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives. Objectively, RTOs define how quickly you need your data to be back online after an outage and RPOs define how often you need to take data backups. For practical purposes, however, RTOs strongly influence the speed of storage you need and RPOs strongly influence the amount of bandwidth you need.

In the world of data centers, realistically, you are probably only going to have one RTO and one RPO for all your production data (archival data is very different). In the world of the cloud, however, you can have different RTOs and RPOs for different categories of data, according to your business needs. This can make a real difference to your costs, especially if you apply them across both your local data backup and your off-site data backup.

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