Business Data Backup Roseville

What do you need to know about business data backup in Roseville?

In the modern world of business, even SMBs need to manage their data actively rather than just collect and store it without any thought. These days, just mindlessly hoarding data can get you into legal trouble (especially if it’s sensitive data). Even if it doesn’t, it can still work out very expensive. On the other hand, you do need to back up your business data effectively. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Roseville.

1. You need to keep the law front and center at all times

The first key point to remember is that for most companies at least some of the data you hold will belong to data subjects (including your employees). Therefore effectively you do not own it, you are just being licensed to use it for a specific purpose and the moment this purpose is complete, that data must be deleted. This is increasingly likely to be a legal requirement and even if it’s not it makes sense both from the point of security (or avoiding lawsuits) and cost.

The second key point to remember is that you will almost certainly be required to keep some data for compliance purposes, if only for tax. There is unlikely to be a requirement to delete this data after the compliance period has ended, but it usually makes sense to do so, again, for reasons of security and cost.

The third key point to remember is that you are responsible for taking care of your data. If anything goes wrong, you will be the one answering the injured party/regulator/law enforcer. This means that you need to make sure that any IT services vendors you use can be made to answer you in a meaningful way, in other words, they can be held legally accountable for their actions. Because of this, it’s strongly recommended to stick with local vendors, especially if you’re an SMB.

2. The better you manage your production data, the better you can manage your backups

Everything starts in production. You want to set up your production system so that it is filled with data that is complete, accurate, and essential to your everyday operations – and nothing else. This, however, is just a starting point, albeit a very good one. You then want to be able to organize your data into relevant categories, so you can fine-tune your cloud settings to match the requirements of each category.

The most obvious example of this is the use of storage. In the cloud, faster storage costs more than slower storage. It, therefore, makes financial sense to use the slowest storage you reasonably can for any given category of data. There is, however, a twist to this and it is that you need to be able to tell the difference between active data which can be put in slow storage, and dormant data which ought to be archived.

This difference is important for two reasons. First of all, even slow storage in production is probably going to cost more than archival storage. Secondly, data that is still in production, even in slow storage, is still going to be backed up, usually twice. This means that you’re going to be paying to store three copies of data you don’t need in production at all. In addition to this, you’re going to be paying the other data backup charges (such as bandwidth) plus you’re going to be taking a hit to the speed of your data backups (and any recovery operations).

3. Your production settings should inform your data backup management

If you are on top of your production settings then your data backup management should, in large part, take care of itself. For example, if you know that data is needed quickly in production, then the chances are that it needs to be made available quickly in a recovery situation and therefore needs a short Recovery Time Objective and fast storage in your online data backup systems. Similarly, if data is updated regularly in your production systems, then it probably needs a short Recovery Point Objective.

4. Remember the importance of bandwidth

There are two reasons why bandwidth matters. The first is cost and the second is network performance. Bandwidth is likely to be the second-biggest factor in determining how much you pay for your business data backups (behind storage) so for that reason alone, it’s worth thinking about how to economize on it. Additionally, your need for bandwidth will factor into the time it takes to back up (and recover) your data and the impact on anybody trying to use the network while these operations are in progress.

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