Data Backup Services Folsom

Things To Know About Data Backup Services

Modern businesses depend on their data, so it is critical to have a robust data backup strategy in place. The good news is that it’s perfectly feasible for SMBs to protect their data in line with their business objectives and at a reasonable cost. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in Folsom.

How To Get Data Backup Services?

1. You should only be backing up your production data

A data backup is essentially a snapshot of your production data at a specific point in time, which is used to restore that data to your production systems if it becomes lost (e.g. deleted) or corrupted. There are three good reasons for having a robust process in place to purge data from your production system as soon as it becomes dormant.

The first is the cost of storage. Even if you need to keep the data (or aren’t comfortable with deleting it), putting it into a data archive is massively more affordable than keeping it in the fast storage needed for production data and its backups.

The second is the cost of bandwidth. If you are continually backing up dormant data, then you are using more bandwidth than necessary. This means that you are running up excess costs and these will accumulate over time unless you take action.

The third is the time taken to perform a data backup and, probably, more importantly, the time taken to restore from one. Again, if you are transporting excess data from A to B, then the heavier load will slow down the transport time.

2. You should be minimizing what data goes into production

The most effective way to stop your production systems from becoming clogged with excess data is to exercise robust control over what data goes into them in the first place. This goes at least double for sensitive data (including sensitive data collected from your own employees) as this is usually subject to stringent legal/compliance requirements.

In addition to minimizing the amount of data you seek to collect, it’s strongly recommended to exercise as much control as you can over the data entry process. Essentially, you want to standardize it as much as you can (for example by using drop-down menus in place of free-text fields). You also want to use data validation as much as possible. This will go a long way to giving you usable data which is free of duplicates.

3. You can treat different kinds of data in different ways

In a data center, you will usually only separate production data from archival data (and you may not even do that), but in the cloud, you can categorize your data into different groups and define individual Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives for each group depending on your businesses objectives and budget.

RTOs define how quickly you need your data back online and RPOs define how long you can go between data backups. This means that your RTO influences the speed of storage you need and RPOs influence the amount of bandwidth you need. Taking the time to set these criteria at an individual level can do a lot to minimize the loss of productivity while still keeping costs down.

4. Combining different types of data backup can also help to increase efficiency

The three main types of data backup are full, incremental, and differential. Full data backups back up all data regardless of whether or not it has changed since the last data backup. 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 complete data backup.

In an ideal world, companies would always take full data backups, but in the real world, this is just far too much of a drain on resources for the average business. The astute move, therefore, is to combine them with incremental and differential data backups. Incremental data backups require the least resources but if it can be complicated, for which read slow, to restore from them. Differential data backups essentially split the difference between full data backups and incremental data backups.

You can also use compression to reduce the size of the data backups even further, you will just need to do so astutely as overdoing this can result in a loss of data quality.

5. Data backups (and archives) are subject to the same laws as production data

Always keep the law (and compliance programs) in mind at all times and remember that in the eyes of the law (and the regulators), you are responsible for your data, not any IT services vendors you use. This means that the onus is on you to select your data backup services provider very carefully.

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

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