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What you need to know about online data backup services in Lodi
Many SMBs will either be thinking about making the switch to online data backups or will have done so already. Some may never have used anything else. As with everything in life, however, there is a difference between doing something and doing it as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, therefore, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in Lodi.
It’s really important to manage your data effectively
One of the common complaints about the cloud, in general, is that it’s really easy for costs to spiral out of control. This, however, is a symptom of people applying “data-center thinking” to the cloud. In data centers, you buy resources up-front and then use them or not as you see fit. In the cloud, you pay for what you use for however long you use it.
This means that, in data centers, all the costs are loaded up-front, so that once you’ve paid for something there is no further penalty for failing to use it economically. In the cloud, by contrast, there is a direct link between consumption and cost. This means that the onus is very much on you to know your data and to know what resources you need and hence how much you will pay.
Of course, how easy this will be in practice will depend largely on the stability of your business requirements. That said, if you are running a business where your IT infrastructure needs change frequently, you are almost certainly going to be massively better off in the cloud than you would be in a traditional data center. It’s also fair to say that some general principles apply regardless of the nature of your business.
Keep your data relevant
You should only be collecting data you either really need or really want. In fact, in the case of sensitive data, it’s usually better to stick to the basis of need. To ensure that you only collect data you really need/want, you have to look not just at what you are collecting but how you are collecting it.
In short, you need to ensure that all your user interfaces facilitate the collection of full and accurate data. Part of this is technical, for example, using appropriate data-entry methods for different types of data and validating the data captured. Part of it is psychological, basically, the better you explain to people why you are asking for data, the more likely you are to get the data you want. This is especially true when it comes to personal data, as people are increasingly sensitive about their privacy.
If you make sure that your production data is completely relevant, which means that it is also completely clean (without any fragments of data or duplicated floating around), then you will already have gone a long way towards both lowering your costs and improving the efficiency of your systems.
You should only have active data in your production systems
Active data is data that is genuinely being used as part of your everyday work. This is the data you need to back up. Anything else is excess data and will add excess costs both to your production systems and your online data backups, of which there should usually be two (one in your main cloud and one in a secondary cloud). If you can’t delete data, either because it’s needed for compliance purposes or because nobody is prepared to authorize the deletion, then at least move it to a data archive where it can be stored more affordably.
Ideally, you will fine-tune your choice of storage speeds
In the world of traditional data backups, you may use different types of physical storage for data backups and data archives but it was usually impractical to try to fine-tune the storage you used any further than that. In the cloud, however, it is not only practical but very much desirable and the better you do it the better you can manage both your costs and your data.
Basically, you want to use the slowest possible storage for any given type of data. Obviously, there is a limit to how far you can take this. For example, if you are storing medical records, which may be needed for urgent care, then you’ll need the fastest storage you can find. If, however, you’re storing records which are used a couple of times a week for batch-processing jobs, then they can reasonably go into much slower storage.
If you replicate these settings across the storage for your online data backups, then you can minimize costs there too, without impacting the user experience.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced online data backup services provider in Lodi, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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