Online Data Backup Services Auburn 

A quick guide to online data backup services in Auburn

Online data backup services work very similarly to traditional data backups, with the added advantage that they can largely be managed remotely. There are, however, some meaningful differences between online data backups and traditional data backups and it’s helpful to be aware of them. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to online data backup services in Auburn.

You need to keep the law in mind at all times 

Obviously, this also applies to offline data backups, however, it has particular relevance to online data backups as their nature makes it easier to lose track of them. For example, if you’re backing up your data to physical storage, you have to transport the media to an appropriate storage location. This means you are guaranteed to know where your data is being kept. If, however, you’re using an online data backup service, you will only know where your data is being physically stored if you actually check with the vendor.

None of this needs to be a problem. The way to stop it becoming one is to select your online data backup services vendor carefully, instruct and supervise them appropriately and make sure that your service contract is both complete and enforceable in practice rather than just in theory.

This is all much easier, particularly for SMBs, if you stick with vendors who are local to you. Because of this, it makes sense to check early on if an online data backup services vendor is actually based in Auburn (or at least near Auburn) or if they’re just offering online data backup services in Auburn.

You can usually back up sensitive data to the public cloud 

Notwithstanding all of the above, you can often backup sensitive data to the public cloud provided that you encrypt it on your own servers first, which is standard practice anyway. What you may or may not be able to do is decrypt your data in the public cloud so that you can work with it there.

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It may, however, be worth investigating whether or not you can do so, as public cloud platforms are increasingly likely to be compliant with the mainstream data protection laws and compliance programs. This means that even if you are not comfortable using a public cloud as your everyday operating environment, you could potentially still use it as a cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

If you’re in the public cloud you should still organize your own online data backups 

Many of the major public cloud providers take automated data backups as part of their service. This can be very convenient, but it offers absolutely no protection against your accesses being used to delete data you wanted or needed to keep (by accident or malice) or against your cloud vendor having an outage leaving you without service for an extended period. Even if you received compensation for the outage later, you would still have to deal with the impact of the outage both in the short and the long term.

You need to be very strict about managing your data

Hopefully, all companies should be applying robust data governance to any sensitive data they hold (and if not, this needs to be addressed as a top priority). If you’re in the cloud, you also need to apply robust data governance to all non-sensitive data you hold, because in the cloud you pay for what you use for as long as you use it. If you then go on to use online data backup services, these costs will then be multiplied across the backups as well (of which there should usually be two, one in your regular cloud and one in an “off-site” cloud).

You will then need to factor in the data transfer costs for this excess data, plus the extra time it will take to process the data backup (or restore from it). Last but not least, if you then proceed to feed this excess data into a data archive, you will increase your costs there as well. These are likely to be much lower as archival storage is much slower than the storage used for production data and its backups, but they will be a waste of money you could have avoided.

You usually have the option to define different RTOs and RPOs for different types of data 

When you are backing up to physical it is usually only practical to have one Recovery Time Objective and one Recovery Point Objective for all of your data. With online data backups, however, you can usually categorize your data according to its importance to your production and give each data category an individual RTO and RPO.

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