Data Backup Lodi

Hiring a data backup partner in Lodi

When companies think about losing data, perhaps their first thought is about cybertheft. This is, of course, an issue and companies need to take steps to protect themselves. For many SMBs, however, the reality is that data loss is more likely to come about as a consequence of accident than malice, for example, hardware corruption or erroneous deletion. That’s why it helps to have a solid data backup strategy and that’s why it can be so useful to have a data backup partner in Lodi on your side. Here are some points to consider before you hire one.

How To Start The Data Backup?

Take a look at your current situation and where you are going

Hiring a new vendor is generally a good time to take stock of your current situation and future plans and hiring a data backup partner in Lodi is no exception to this. In particular, you want to see how your IT infrastructure is split between old-school data centers, private clouds and public clouds and how this is likely to change in the future. The chances are that if you are still running old-school data centers, you will be looking to get rid of them as quickly as possible, but your own situation will determine how quickly this will be.

Decide whether or not you really need or want to backup to physical media

Archiving to physical media is still very popular. In fact, it looks very much like the future of data archiving will be to duplicate archives over a physical device and a cloud. Archiving, however, is essentially the long-term storage of data which is highly unlikely to be needed in a hurry, if at all. Regular data backups are about making sure you can restore production data if it is corrupted or lost and in that situation, the quicker you can recover, the quicker you can get back to work.

This reality is one of the main reasons why companies are moving away from backing up to physical media. If you move a physical device off-site, then you have to retrieve it before you can recover from it, which, of course, takes time. If, however, you keep the device on-site, then you have to protect it from all threats (environmental and criminal), and you can only restore from it if you can get access to it.

All in all, therefore, backing up to a physical device is really only likely to be worth the effort for people in fairly niche situations. One is that they are still using old-school data centers and the other is that they have an unreliable internet connection and even then there are workarounds.

Be aware that you can backup from physical media to the cloud

These days, companies of all sizes, especially SMBs, are backing up directly from one cloud to another. It is, however, possible, to send a physical device to a vendor and have them upload the data to a cloud for you. This is typically used for the initial (“cloud-seeding”) backup, generally as an alternative to either doing it out of hours or consuming significant amounts of bandwidth while users are trying to work. In principle, however, it can be done at any time.

This means that if you were in a situation where you’d struggle to backup directly to the cloud, at least on a regular basis, then you could use the “old-school” approach of backing up directly to two physical devices and send one to a vendor to be uploaded into a cloud. Then you would have the option of recovering either from your on-site physical device or from the cloud (you could even ask the vendor to hold onto the physical device as an extra precaution).

Think carefully about whether you want to backup to a public cloud or a private cloud (or both)

For the sake of clarity, if you are relying on the automated backups made by many public cloud platforms, then you are basically gambling with the safety of your data. You will be entirely on your own if your vendor has an outage (or disappears) or if one of your employees accidentally (or maliciously) deletes data. It is strongly advisable to have at least one separate copy of your data stored elsewhere.

Backing up data to a(nother) public cloud can be very cost-effective over the long term. It is, however, important to be prepared for initial set-up costs (which may be higher than you expect due to the level of technicality involved) and you need to remember that this is not a “set-and-forget” solution. You may also find that legalities/compliance require you to use a private cloud, or at least strongly favor doing so.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and data backup partner in Lodi, please click here now to speak to Aperio.IT.

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