Data Backup Solutions in Elk grove 

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

Anything which disrupts your access to your data also disrupts your business. Your plan A should always be to do everything possible to minimize these disruptions. In the real world, however, life is always going to happen from time to time. That means you need to be ready for it and that means you need a good data backup solution. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup solutions in Elk Grove.

You need to be clear about the difference between data backups and data archives 

A data backup is a snapshot of your production data. It’s used to help you get back into production after a failure. A data archive is a place to store data that may be needed (or which may be wanted at some point, but not urgently). While they both involve saving data to a storage medium (these days usually a cloud), they are very different concepts. In a data center environment, it can be useful to separate them, in a cloud environment, it is vital to separate them.

You almost always want to backup to a cloud 

Regardless of what environment you are in, it usually makes sense to follow the tried-and-tested 3-2-1 strategy. That’s three copies of your data over two media (including clouds) with one copy being kept off-site (in a secondary cloud). In a data center, it may make sense to use physical storage for your local backup, but even in a data center it usually makes sense to use the cloud for your off-site backup. If you’re already in the cloud (public or private), then backing up to a second cloud is usually the only sensible option.

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For the sake of completeness, there may still be a case for archiving to a physical device, but these days companies which archive to physical storage often archive to the cloud as well and it’s becoming increasingly common just to archive to two clouds.

Why clouds are usually the best solution

If you’re in a data center, backing up to a cloud saves you the hassle of having to transport physical media to an off-site storage location and saves you the time needed to bring them back again before you can restore from them. If you’re already in a cloud, then it simply makes no sense whatsoever to download your data to a physical medium only to have to upload it again before you can use it. In fact, doing so removes your ability to operate your data backups and restores remotely which is usually a major benefit of being in the cloud.

Sensitive data and the cloud 

Sensitive data can usually be stored in a public cloud, provided that you encrypt it on your own servers first and keep it encrypted all the time it is in the public cloud. This means that if you are in a data center or a private cloud, you can use the public cloud as a cost-effective data-storage location. What you cannot do is decrypt your data in the public cloud, so you cannot use it as a disaster-recovery solution.

If you’re in a data center, then that fact is really irrelevant because you wouldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) use the cloud in any case. If you’re in a private cloud, by contrast, the situation is a bit more complex. On the one hand, storing data in the public cloud is very cost-effective as compared to storing it in a private cloud, such as your disaster recovery cloud. What’s more, it’s unlikely to impact your general recovery times because mostly you’ll be restoring to your main location and probably using your on-site copy.

On the other hand, in a disaster recovery situation, your time to recovery will be impacted by the fact that you will need to transmit your data to your disaster recovery cloud and then decrypt it. If you have a significant quantity of production data, then this could have a significant impact, although you could potentially mitigate it by operating a tiered-recovery strategy that prioritizes the recovery of data according to its level of importance for the business.

The internet and bandwidth 

It is strongly recommended to look at the possibility of reducing the amount of bandwidth you need by interspersing full data backups with incremental data backups and/or differential data backups and also by the appropriate use of compression. This not only increases the speed of both data backup and recovery but also reduces your costs.

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