Data backup storage Elk Grove

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

While data backup storage costs may not be a huge part of an organization’s IT spend, let alone its overall spend, they do still make a difference to a company’s bottom line. It, therefore, makes sense to think about how to balance the need to maximize performance with the desire to minimize outgoings. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in Elk Grove.

The better you manage your production data, the less data backup storage you need 

A lot of data backup management starts in your production systems. Regardless of your working environment, you should aim to have them filled with data that is both clean and active. Ideally, this data should be segmented in a way that reflects your business priorities. If you’re in a cloud, this will allow you to choose different speeds of storage for different types of data. If you’re in a data center, this is a step towards creating a situation where you can bring whole servers back online in a logical sequence instead of just recovering data randomly.

Production systems should never hold dormant data

This was mentioned in the previous point, but it’s so important, it’s worth highlighting on its own. Most data has a lifecycle. It starts as active and then becomes dormant. It may fade away rather than just go dormant overnight, but sooner or later most data will eventually cease to be of active use. At that point, it should usually be deleted unless there is a specific case for keeping it. This is usually compliance, but may be historical value or general interest.

If it does need to be kept, then it should go into a data archive. For completeness, most archived data also becomes unnecessary at some point. In the case of personal data, it is often a legal requirement to delete it as soon as the relevant compliance period has ended. Even if it isn’t, it’s arguably the most ethical approach. For other data, it’s generally up to you whether or not you delete it, but, again, if it’s serving no purpose and isn’t actively wanted, then the best move is usually to get rid of it.

In both cases, you need a robust process for identifying when data needs to be moved out of production (and what should happen to it) and when it should be deleted from an archive.

Your data backup storage should be about double your production data storage 

As a rule of thumb, you want one local data backup and one off-site data backup. This means you should budget on the assumption that your data backup storage needs to be about double the volume of your production data storage. This isn’t an absolute rule. There are ways you can bring this down. The most obvious one is to make astute use of compression. It is, however, a good rule of thumb as it’s better to have excess budget left at the end of the year than to be short.

In the cloud, you can fine-tune your data backup storage settings to reduce costs 

Regardless of your everyday working environment, the public cloud is usually by the far the best choice of data backup storage location. It offers robust security and great convenience all at a cost most SMBs can afford. In fact, the major public cloud providers are now secure enough to be viable candidates for use as business continuity/disaster recovery solutions, even for businesses in regulated sectors.

One of the great benefits of the public cloud is that it makes it easy to segment your data and assign each data segment its own Recovery Time Objective. This can then be used to guide your use of data backup storage. Keeping the fastest (and most expensive) storage for data with the shortest RTOs can be a great way to reduce costs without impacting on business needs or user satisfaction.

If you’re in a data center, you need to think carefully about physical storage 

In a data center, you’ll be taking your local backup to physical media. For practical purposes, this basically means tapes and/or hard drives.

Tapes used to be the only real option and are still in use by companies that have already invested in the necessary infrastructure (for example tape drives) and want to maximize their return. Over the long term, tapes are very economical and they are indisputably robust, but they are also very slow and cannot be searched easily.

Hard drives are more affordable to implement, straightforward to use, much faster, and searchable. They are not, however, remotely robust. This means that they are best kept in data centers rather than used for off-site storage.

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