Salient IT Services › Data backup services in West Sacramento
What you need to know about data backup services in West Sacramento
Even though cloud platforms and the IT services industry both do a lot to keep companies running smoothly, from time to time life is going to happen and it pays to be prepared for when it does. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in West Sacramento.
The better you manage your data, the better you can manage your data backup costs
Effective data management both complies with the law and keeps costs to a minimum. Achieving both of these objectives starts with knowing your data. First of all, you need a robust mechanism for identifying and tracking any sensitive data you hold. This includes sensitive data from your own employees. Then you need a process for identifying when data is active and when it becomes dormant.
Dormant data should be deleted unless it is either needed (for compliance purposes) or wanted (perhaps for historical value). If it is, it should be archived until the compliance period has ended. After this sensitive data must be deleted and general data can and usually should be deleted unless there is a very compelling reason for keeping it.
Robustly purging dormant data from your production system means that you’re only paying for fast storage for data you might need quickly i.e. production data. Archival data can go into slow storage, which is usually significantly more affordable.
If you can take this a step further and organize your data into categories according to its level of importance for your everyday business, then you have the option to use different speeds of storage for different categories of data. This can be a great way to reduce your cloud spend without overly inconveniencing users.
Solid data governance will keep your data backups on the right side of the law
Remember that the law applies to data, regardless of whether it is in production, held as a data backup or stored in an archive. Also, remember that the law applies to you, not your cloud platform or to any IT services vendors you use. This means that you need to vet any data backup services vendor thoroughly before you hire them and exercise an appropriate degree of supervision over them.
It also means that you need to ensure not only that your service contract requires your data backup services vendor to honor your legal obligations but also that it’s actually enforceable in the real world rather than just in theory. In blunt terms, the closer your IT services vendors are located to you, the easier it usually is to enforce contracts through legal action if necessary.
Data backups play a crucial role in disaster-recovery planning
A data backup is simply a copy of your production data. In the real world, it’s probably fair to say that data backups are generally used to remedy cases of data corruption (for example if a change goes wrong) or accidental deletion. It’s only very occasionally that they’re needed to remedy cases of cybertheft (or attempted cybertheft) or to recover from a disaster. This does, however, happen and so it makes sense to be prepared for it.
In order to turn your data backup into a complete disaster recovery solution, you need to provide your staff members with the tools they need to work with the data you have backed up. For example, they will usually need an operating system and applications. How you go about this will generally depend on your standard IT environment.
If you are in a data center, then you will need to run a second data center. You can, however, use the public cloud as a place to store your off-site data backups. This not only eliminates the need to transport physical devices to an off-site storage facility but also eliminates the need to retrieve them from off-site storage before you can restore from them. This makes for much quicker and more convenient restores in both your standard data center and your disaster-recovery location.
If you are in a public cloud then you can simply back up your data to another public cloud and add the necessary tools for a cost-effective and convenient all-in-one solution.
If you’re in the private cloud, you can usually back up your data to the public cloud and if you can decrypt it there, then you may be able to use it as a disaster-recovery solution. If you can’t then you can either connect your public cloud to a second private cloud that you use for disaster recovery or just store your data backups in your disaster recovery cloud.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup services provider in West Sacramento, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
Loading...
