Business Data Backup Placerville

Why Do We Need Business Data Backups In Placerville?

It’s incredible how much data modern businesses produce, even SMBs. Much of this data will be vital to the company’s everyday operations. This means that any interruption to its availability will hurt the company’s productivity. That’s exactly why business data backups are so important. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backups in Placerville.

1. You usually need two of them

For many years now, businesses have organized their data backups according to the 3-2-1 principle. That’s three copies of your data across two media, with one copy being kept off-site. The way this is implemented has changed over the years. For example, these days, media is a whole lot more likely to mean clouds than physical storage devices. The general principle, however, remains good. Taking two data backups generally hits the sweet spot between protection and cost-effectiveness, while keeping your security risks manageable.

2. that data security also applies to business data backups

A data backup is a snapshot of your production data. It will, literally, hold everything which is in your production systems. It, therefore, needs to be protected to the same extent as your production systems. This fact has two main implications.

First of all, you need to know who has access to or even contact with your data. That includes both in-house staff and any IT services vendors you use. Both need to be vetted carefully and both need to be subject to robust and enforceable contracts. For a contract to be enforceable, it needs to be both valid under law and capable of being actioned in the real world, rather than just in theory.

Taking legal action is a whole lot easier when both parties are in the same legal jurisdiction. This is a strong argument in favor of sticking with both local employees (at least for functions that have security implications) and local IT services, and vendors.

3. You can store sensitive data in public clouds

Having just said that it is, nevertheless, not only feasible but often desirable to store sensitive data in public clouds. You need to encrypt it before sending it online anyway, so you just keep it encrypted until you are ready to use it. This is also good practice anyway.

What may come as even more of a surprise is that it is increasingly feasible to decrypt sensitive data in public clouds. In short, the mainstream public cloud vendors have been working hard to demonstrate compliance with the major data protection laws and compliance programs (including international ones such as GDPR).

Of course, the choice of private cloud versus public cloud often involves more than “just” data security. It will probably be a long time before certain industries would even consider using public clouds as their everyday operating infrastructure, but it may be well worth considering the public cloud for short-term use such as in business continuity and disaster recovery situations.

4. You should only be backing up active data

Even in the days of data centers and physical storage, it was preferable to avoid backing up dormant data. In those days it was less the cost of storage that was the issue (physical storage has been priced very affordably for a very long time), it was the extra time needed to take the data backups and then to restore from them. This meant that companies could often get away with allowing dormant data to build up to a certain level and then purging it from their production systems.

In the cloud, by contrast, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. This means that allowing dormant data to build up and then purging it is a very expensive way of doing business. Not only does it increase the cost of storage, but it also increases bandwidth usage and hence data transfer charges.

This means that you need a system for tracking data throughout its life cycle, both in production and and, if relevant, once it has been put in a data archive. Again, you should only be archiving data that is actually needed or wanted for a specific purpose.

It is usually mandatory to delete sensitive data as soon as it has served its assigned purpose (and even if it isn’t it’s very beneficial to do so as it improves security and reduces costs). It is highly recommended to follow this approach for all data, mostly because of cost. Even though archival storage is much more affordable than fast storage, it is still a cost and so you want to minimize it as far as reasonably possible.

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