Business Data Backup Woodland

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

Your data will probably be one of the most important parts of your business. It may even be your business. That means it needs to be effectively protected. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to what you need to know about business data backup in Woodland.

Functions Of Business Data Backup

1. The less data you hold, the less data you need to back up

You should already be collecting sensitive data based on need and holding it only for as long as it is needed. It’s a good idea to apply this principle across all data. Unless you need it or want it, it should be purged from your systems. If you get pushback on this, then you could try purging it from your cloud systems onto physical storage.

On the one hand, this is far from ideal for cloud-native/cloud-first businesses. On the other hand, if you think it’s data that should be deleted anyway, this could be a compromise that keeps it available, but also keeps it from running up cloud storage costs.

2. Storage settings are a major part of cloud data backup costs

While various factors influence how much you pay for online data backups, storage is usually by far the biggest. In the days of data centers, you might differentiate between production data (and its backups) and archival data, but that would usually be it. In the world of the cloud, however, you can fine-tune your storage settings to reflect how quickly the data is needed and you can use this to inform the storage settings you use for your online data backups.

For example, if you have data that needs to be kept in the fastest storage you can get, the chances are you’re going to want it back online quickly, so its backups will probably also need to go in the fastest storage you can find. By contrast, if you have data that is only used occasionally, then it’s probably not going to be a huge issue if it’s recovered relatively slowly and hence it can go into slow storage both in your production system and in your online data backup storage.

You should usually have two backups of your data. One stays in your regular cloud and the other should be in a second cloud. If you’re (still) running a data center, then you might want to keep an on-site copy on physical storage, but even in a data center, it generally makes sense to use a cloud for your off-site copy. These days, transporting data over the internet is usually easier, quicker (and arguably safer) than transporting it by road, especially in urban areas such as Woodland.

3. It’s usually fine to store sensitive data in a public cloud

Even for SMBs in heavily-regulated industries, it’s usually acceptable to store sensitive data in a public cloud. You just encrypt it on your servers first and keep it encrypted until it is either back on your servers or deleted. It is becoming increasingly feasible to decrypt data in public clouds, especially the mainstream ones. This means that, even if you’re not keen on using them in your everyday working environment, you might still want to look at them as a potential disaster recovery solution.

4. Bandwidth matters a lot

After storage, bandwidth is likely to be the factor that has the most influence on the cost of your business data backups. You want to save on it as much as you can and there are three main techniques you can use to do so.

First of all, you can fine-tune your Recovery Point Objectives. These essentially define how often your data needs to be backed up. In the days of data centers, it was quite common to have one RPO for all data. In the cloud, however, you can fine-tune this so that the frequency with which data is backed up reflects the frequency with which it is updated.

Secondly, you can use compression. This reduces the size of the files and hence reduces the amount of bandwidth you require. Just be careful to avoid overdoing it, as this can damage the files. This is particularly important if you’re in a regulated industry keeping data for compliance purposes. Remember it needs to be legible to be legal!

Thirdly, you can combine full data backups with incremental data backups and differential data backups. Incremental data backups only back up data that has changed since the last data backup. Differential data backups only back up data that has changed since the last full data backup.

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