Online Data Backup Services West Sacramento

What you need to know about online data backup services in West Sacramento

Given that most SMBs will probably be working mainly, if not completely, in the cloud, the term “online data backups” is likely to mean cloud-to-cloud data backups. These follow the same principles as traditional data backups, but there are a few specific points it is helpful to understand. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in West Sacramento.

The better you manage your production data the better you can manage your data backups 

In the cloud, you pay for what you use. This means that the less you use, the less you will pay. If you minimize the quantity of data you keep in production, you will not only reduce the operating costs of holding your production data, but also the costs of taking and storing your online data backups.

Two key factors will influence the quality of your production data. The first is the way you manage your data input process. If you make sure your user interfaces guide staff members to input data in an accurate, complete and standardized way, you will minimize your chances of accumulating irrelevant, excess data. The second is the speed with which you move dormant data out of your production systems.

It’s important to keep the law/compliance in mind at all times 

Of course, this applies to traditional data backups as well, but it has particular implications for online data backups. The reason for this is that good digital security starts with good physical security. This means that you need to know where, geographically, your data is being held. In the old days, you would automatically know this since you would have to transport physical devices to a storage location, on-site or off-site. With online data backups, however, a cloud vendor could hold your data anywhere in the world and you would be none the wiser – unless you asked.

Request Data Backup

From a legal/compliance perspective, however, there are likely to be restrictions on where in the world your data can be stored and sometimes these can be very strict ones backed by severe penalties (think GDPR). These penalties are applied to the companies which own the data, not the IT services vendors they use. Because of this, the onus is on SMBs to vet their IT services vendors carefully and to ensure that the service contract between them is enforceable in the real world, not just in theory. This is a strong argument in favor of staying with local companies.

You usually can keep sensitive data in a public cloud 

The mainstream public clouds are increasingly likely to be compliant with the data protection laws in major countries plus large-scale compliance programs such as GDPR, PCI/DSS, HIPAA and so forth. This means that, in principle, even if you are in a regulated industry, there is a distinct possibility that you could do all of your work in a public cloud if you so wished.

Even if you didn’t you could encrypt your data on your own servers and then transport it to a public cloud for storage. The question would then become how this cloud storage would fit into your disaster recovery plans. You could connect your public cloud storage location to your regular private cloud and to a second private cloud that you kept for disaster recovery. You would need to make it possible for data to flow from one cloud to the other in both directions so that everything could be resynchronized after the event was resolved.

This is often more cost-effective than using a second private cloud both to store your online data backups and as a disaster-recovery solution. That said, it can be somewhat slower, which may be a consideration for some SMBs.

You might, however, want at least to take a look at the even more cost-effective option of using the public cloud, not just to store your online data backups, but as a complete disaster recovery solution. Although this would require decrypting your data, it would only be held in the clear for short periods.

If you’re working in the public cloud, you should organize your own data backups 

There are two reasons why you should resist the temptation to save money by relying solely on the automated online data backups offered by many public cloud platforms. The first is that you could delete your own data in error (or fall victim to a malicious actor). If this happens, then it’s your problem, not your cloud provider’s problem. The second is that even the biggest cloud providers can have outages so it pays to have a Plan B.

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