Business Data Backup Folsom

Things To Know About Business Data Backup Ideas

These days, managing your business data is a bit like managing your tax returns. It may not be fun, but it is essential to the survival of your business. Failure to do either can have serious legal (and hence financial) implications. The good news is that managing your business data backups can be a whole lot easier than managing your taxes. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Folsom.

Need To Know data backup in Folsom

1. Data backups are subject to the same laws as production data

Any laws which apply to your production data also apply to your business data backups. This means that they need to be protected to the same extent. Most companies should have two data backups, one local and one off-site.

The local one, literally, by definition, should be held in your local environment, so it should have at least the same standards of protection. In fact, it should usually be even more strongly protected since it is not a working copy so it can be kept encrypted and access to it can usually be restricted even further than for the production copy.

The off-site one, in principle, just needs to be somewhere which is at a distance from your main working location, but still accessible and, of course, safe. In practice, regardless of your main working environment, the public cloud is usually the sensible option. This may come as a surprise given the emphasis on data security, however, the fact that the files can be kept encrypted is usually enough to ensure their safety.

It is also fair to say that public cloud providers are increasingly likely to be able to comply with mainstream data protection laws and compliance programs (including GDPR). This means that you could, in principle, decrypt your data inside their platform. You may not want to do this regularly, but it could be worth considering as a cost-effective route to a complete disaster recovery solution.

2. You need to apply rigorous oversight of your data

This stems from the above point. You are responsible for protecting your data. You can delegate tasks but you cannot delegate accountability. In other words, if anything happens to your data, you will be the ones explaining yourself to law enforcement/regulators not your IT services vendors. This means that you have to protect yourself by applying thorough due diligence to any IT services vendors you are thinking about employing and back this up with a robust and enforceable IT services contract.

Always keep in mind that, in and of themselves, contracts are just pieces of paper. They only have value if you can not only use them to get a court judgment in your favor but also enforce that judgment in the real world. This last point should never be overlooked and is a strong argument in favor of sticking with local vendors, especially if you’re an SMB.

3. Storage is likely to be the biggest factor in the cost of online data backups

Part of the cost of storage will be determined by how much data you hold, so it pays to take steps to minimize this as far as you reasonably can. In many businesses, the challenge may be determining what is reasonable. If this brings you to an impasse, one way to remove the block might be to move some data offline storage.

This is far from ideal if you’re wholly or even mainly in the cloud, but the basic idea would be to use this approach to deal with data that was just hanging around your systems for no apparent reason other than that you couldn’t get the necessary permission to delete it. Taking it offline would mean it could be recovered (albeit slowly) if it turned out to be needed, but would stop eating up cloud storage costs.

The other part of the cost of storage will be determined by how you hold your data, or, in other words, what speed of storage you use. In the old world of data centers, you would typically have one type of storage for all your production data (and its backups). In the world of the cloud, however, you can, should, and arguably must fine-tune, your storage settings so you are always using the slowest reasonable speed of storage for any given category of data.

Your choice of storage speed for your production data is generally a good indicator of your Recovery Time Objectives and hence the speed of storage you should use for the different categories of data in your online data backups.

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