Business Data Backup Elk Grove

Modern businesses depend on their data. Even SMBs can produce more data than the corporations of only a couple of decades ago. This data is often essential not just to the health of the business, but to its survival, so it needs to be protected. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Elk Grove.

What Do you Know About Business Data Backup?

1. Even with the cloud, it’s good to keep your data close to home

These days, the term “business data backups” generally translates as “cloud-to-cloud data backups”. Very few modern SMBs are likely to be running data centers at all, let alone using them as their core infrastructure. Such that are probably using the cloud to store an off-site data backup. Most SMBs will be either cloud-native or cloud-first, so both their “local” and “off-site” backups will be in a cloud.

In the cloud you can, in theory, hold your data wherever you want and have any IT services vendor from anywhere in the world take care of it for you. In practice, that’s very likely to be illegal and even if it isn’t, it’s likely to be more of a risk than the average SMB can handle.

Your data may be accessed online but it will be kept on physical servers somewhere in the world. It’s very much advisable to make sure that “somewhere” is local enough for you to have clear oversight of how it is being stored and managed. Similarly, it’s highly advisable to stick to local IT services vendors, i.e. ones which work under the same legal system as you and hence are answerable to the same courts.

2. You need to be able to track data through its life-cycle(s)

It is usually a legal requirement to delete sensitive data the moment it has ceased to be needed. To do that, you need to be able to identify when it is being used and when it falls dormant. You then need to be able to identify if it must then be stored for compliance (and if so when the compliance period ends and you must immediately delete it).

Similarly, you need to be able to identify non-sensitive data that is needed for compliance purposes. In principle, you can hold this after the compliance period has ended. In practice, it usually makes more sense to delete it. This is mainly to reduce storage costs, but it also improves security.

Legally, you do not need to take any special measures with general data, but in practice, it makes sense to track what is actively being used and what isn’t. Again, keeping track of this can go a long way toward reducing storage costs and it can also lower security risks.

Remember, that, for the most part, the law only concerns itself with how you protect other people’s data, including the data which may be requested of you by law enforcers such as regulators. You may have a lot of data that falls outside of either of these categories, but you would still very much like to keep it confidential. That being so, you want to identify if it’s being used and if it’s not, then think carefully about whether or not you need to keep it.

3. The better you manage your storage the better you can manage your costs

In the world of data centers, you buy storage once and use it as you see fit. In the world of the cloud, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. Both points are worth noting.

If you know how urgently your data is needed, then you’ll know what sort of storage it needs in production. This will inform your Recovery Time Objective and hence what sort of storage you use for your business data backups, of which there should usually be two.

If you’re scrupulous about using storage only when it’s needed and making sure to spin it down when it’s not, then you’ll not only avoid waste in your production system, but you’ll also avoid backing up data you don’t need (at all let alone in production) and hence save costs there too.

4. You can store sensitive data in the public cloud
Speaking of storage, possibly the single, biggest way to save money on it is to use a public cloud instead of a private one. This is usually possible even in regulated industries provided that you keep your data encrypted in the public cloud unless your public cloud can demonstrate compliance with all relevant data protection laws (and compliance programs). This is becoming increasingly likely so you may even be able to decrypt your data in a public cloud and use it as a complete disaster recovery solution.

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