Data Backup Services Placerville

What do you need to know about data backup services in Placerville?

All modern businesses must practice effective data management and having a robust data backup strategy in place is an integral part of this. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in Placerville.

Data Backup Services Placerville

Understanding Data Backup Services

1. Effective data management is a must

If you’re in a data center, then effective data management keeps you on the right side of the law and helps trim your costs. If you’re in a cloud, effective data management keeps you on the right side of the law and stops your costs from escalating out of all proportion to your actual legitimate usage. In either case, the part about keeping on the right side of the law is massively important, not just to avoid heavy fines but also to avoid damage to your reputation.

2. You are responsible for your data

Remember that legally and ethically, the responsibility of managing your data lies with you, not with any IT services vendors you use. This has several implications. Firstly, it means that you need to exercise proper data governance so that you can instruct your IT services vendors appropriately. Secondly, it means that you need to be scrupulous about the way you select and supervise any IT services vendors you use, including any data backup services vendors you use. Thirdly, it means you need to ensure that your service contracts are both robust and enforceable.

Robust is fairly obvious, but enforceable means thinking about the practicalities of enforcing a contract rather than just the theory. In simple terms, the closer someone is located to you, the easier it usually is to get them into a courtroom and, of course, vice versa.

This means that you usually want to check early on if a vendor offering data backup services in Placerville is located in Placerville (or at least near Placerville) or if they are based elsewhere and working remotely. This can make a lot of difference to your ability to enforce your contract.

3. It’s important to think about bandwidth as well as storage

The 3-2-1 strategy has been around for many years now and is still the best choice for most companies. According to this strategy, you keep three copies of your data (including your production copy), across two media (including clouds) with one copy being kept off-site (in a different cloud). This is enough to provide meaningful protection without either incurring excess costs or, rather ironically, exposing yourself to excess risk, namely the threat of a cybercriminal attacking your data backups.

Regardless of whether you’re working in a data center, a public cloud, or a private cloud, you are unlikely to need to worry about bandwidth costs for your local data backup. In a data center, you’ll probably be taking this to physical storage. In a public cloud, automated local backups will probably be included as part of your cloud platform’s service and in a private cloud, you set your own rules.

When it comes to off-site data backups, however, the situation is very different. Although off-site data backups are sometimes used to restore to a company’s standard system, their main function, or at least one of their key functions, is to allow companies to recover after a disaster, which may see them having to switch their operations to another location. These days this means that, even if you’re still working in a data center, the cloud is often the most sensible option and if you’re already in a cloud (public or private), then it’s effectively the only option.

Since you’ll be exporting data to a (second) cloud, and potentially importing data back from that cloud, you need to think about bandwidth considerations. Keeping your data clean and ensuring that you are only backing up data you genuinely need for production will go a long way to taming both your bandwidth needs and your storage needs, but there are further steps you can and usually should take both to speed up your restores (and the data backup process itself) and reduce costs.

Most importantly of all, you need to decide how often to use full data backups, versus how often to use incremental and/or differential data backups.

Full data backups, as the name suggests, back up all data, regardless of whether or not it has changed since the last backup. Incremental data backups only back up data that has changed since the last backup and differential data backups only back up data that has changed since the last full backup. Getting this right and using compression appropriately (i.e. without overdoing it and damaging the quality of the data), can go a long way toward taming your bandwidth needs.

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

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