Business Data Backup Davis

A quick guide to what you need to know about business data backups in Davis

It’s easy for modern businesses, even SMBs, to produce vast quantities of data and that data is very likely to be crucial to their productivity so it needs to be protected. In addition to implementing robust IT security, possibly with the help of a managed IT security provider, companies also need to have a robust business data backup strategy. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backups in Davis.

You usually need two of them

Regardless of whether you are (still) running a data center or if you are in the cloud, you generally want one “on-site” data backup and one “off-site” data backup. The reason the terms “on-site” and “off-site” are in quotes is that these days they only have their original meaning if you’re running a data center and literally holding your on-site data backup on your local premises.

It may also hold true for some companies running their own private clouds, but even they are quite likely to have their “local” infrastructure housed somewhere than their regular business premises. This is particularly likely in urban areas such as Davis, where business space is likely to be much more expensive than out-of-town hosting space.

If you’re running a data center or a private cloud, then you probably have the technical expertise to be comfortable with managing online data backups (or you have a good business data backup vendor to do it for you). If you’re in the public cloud, then you may be tempted to rely on the automated online data backups offered by many public cloud vendors or, at most, to open a second account with that vendor to house another copy of your data.

Resist any temptation to do this. It’s worth making the effort and budget to undertake cloud-to-cloud online data backups. First of all, it will give you protection against you accidentally deleting your data (or having one of your accounts compromised and a malicious actor deleting it). Secondly, it will also lay the foundations of a disaster recovery solution, so that if anything does happen to your main cloud, you have a Plan B ready to go).

You need to protect your online data backups appropriately

Data backups are a snapshot of your production data. They will probably include sensitive data and compliance-related data along with data with may not be legally-protected but which you would prefer to keep confidential, for example, plans for marketing campaigns. This means that you need to take their protection as seriously as you would take the protection of your production data.

For your off-site data backup, you need to encrypt the data before it even leaves your servers. This can be a lot easier to do in a data center or a private cloud than it is in a public cloud. That’s probably at least part of the reason why some companies, especially smaller SMBs, may be tempted to skip taking an off-site data backup. It is, however, possible and a good business data backup vendor will be able to help.

It’s generally a good idea to keep the data backups encrypted (preferably in both clouds) unless you are going to work with the data, for example in a disaster recovery situation.

You also need to control who has access to your online data backups and what level of access they have. Ideally, you will protect logins with two-factor authentication and work with public cloud vendors who make it easy to delete logins quickly as this is vital to limiting any damage in the event of a compromise.

Last, but definitely by no means least, you need to make sure to delete your online data backups as they expire (and are replaced by new ones). Not only does this improve security but it also helps to reduce your costs.

You need to move dormant data out of your production systems

This is another move that both improves security and reduces costs. Any data kept in your production systems should be data that serves an active need. If data falls dormant then it is clearly not serving an active need and needs to be moved on swiftly partly for reasons of security and partly for reasons of cost.

The approach to getting rid of dormant data should ideally be to delete it unless there is a specific reason to keep it, such as compliance, in which case you transfer it to a data archive until it must/can be deleted. This approach must be used for sensitive data (it’s usually a legal requirement) and it’s strongly recommended in general. It’s also important to have a process by which data is then deleted from the archive, at the very least sensitive data needs to be removed as soon as the compliance period has expired.

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