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What you need to know about data backup services in Placerville
In the modern world, backing up your data is, effectively (and sometimes legally) mandatory. How you manage your data backups can make a whole lot of difference both to your operating costs and your overall efficiency. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in Placerville.
Obeying the law/regulators will save you heavy fines and bad publicity
It is impossible to overstate the importance of making sure that you understand both the law and the requirements of any compliance programs you must follow. While their underlying principles tend to remain the same, their practical requirements can be, and often are, updated fairly regularly. This means that you can end up on the wrong side of them simply by failing to keep on top of what they are. You can also end up on the wrong side of them by just losing track of your data items and hence failing to protect them properly.
In short, therefore, you need to be very clear about the fact that, legally and ethically, you are accountable for any data items you own, especially, but not exclusively, any sensitive, personal data you hold (and this includes the sensitive data gathered from your employees) and any data required for legal purposes (for example tax-related documents). You cannot delegate accountability for this so you must ensure that you select your IT services vendors very carefully, instruct and supervise them appropriately and make sure that every important obligation is covered in an enforceable contract.
The key point to note is “enforceable”. In practical terms, this means both that the terms of a contract are valid under the law (which varies according to location) and that you have a feasible chance of getting the other party into a courtroom so that you can present your case to a judge. Achieving both these objectives is usually significantly easier if you stick to working under your own legal system and with IT services partners who are also domiciled in your area.
Practicing good data hygiene goes a long way to increasing efficiency (and lowering costs)
Meeting your legal requirements is a minimum standard rather than a target. On top of this you should, at the very least, be identifying what data is active and what is dormant and making sure that the latter is purged from your production system either through deletion or archiving. Ideally, you should be applying robust processes and practices to keep all your data as clean as possible. For example, you can use standardized data-entry forms that are designed to ensure standard formatting and some level of validation, including checking for duplicates.
These may all seem like small measures, and on their own, that’s exactly that they are, but it can be amazing how much of a difference small measures can make when repeated over time, especially when you’re working in the cloud, where there is a very direct link between consumption and costs.
The cloud offers you the opportunity to fine-tune how you manage your data backups
Managing data backups essentially revolves around deciding how much data you can afford to lose (and hence how long you can go between taking data backups) and how quickly you need the data to be back in production if you need to restore from your backup. These criteria are known as the Recovery Point Objective and the Recovery Time Objective.
When you are working with physical storage then, in the real world, you are probably only going to be able to implement one Recovery Point Objective and one Recovery Time Objective for all your data. In the cloud, however, you can fine-tune this by dividing your data into categories according to its relevance for your production operations. This is generally known as implementing a “tiered-recovery strategy” and it can be an excellent way to minimize downtime while still keeping costs under control.
Remember to think about bandwidth as well as storage
It’s easy to focus on storage needs, especially in the cloud, when getting the right data in the right type of storage can make so much of a difference to your costs. It is, however, important to remember to think about bandwidth too.
A lot of the actions you take to reduce the volume of data you back up will also reduce your bandwidth needs, but you can take this even further by combining full data backups with incremental data backups (which only back up data which has changed since the last data backup) and differential data backups (which only back up data which has changed since the last full data backup).
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup services provider in Placerville, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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