For many modern SMBs, the three pillars of their business are cash-flow, staff, and data. Often these feed into each other with the result that an interruption to one will have a knock-on effect on the others. The good news is that you can substantially reduce the likelihood of losing access to your data by implementing a bit of advanced planning. With that in mind, here is what you need to know about data backup services in Yuba City.
1. Your primary focus should be on keeping your production systems in good order
There are two main reasons for taking data backups. The first is so that you can restore to your regular systems after an incident (such as accidental deletion). The second is so that you can lay the foundations for a disaster recovery solution, which will get you back in business again after a major event. Obviously, you would ideally want to avoid having to recover from either but in the real world, there’s likely to be little you can do to prevent disasters from happening. By contrast, there is usually a lot you can do to keep your production systems running smoothly.
2. You need to keep the law in mind at all times
While this is arguably stating the obvious, it can be only too easy to slide inadvertently onto the wrong side of data protection laws (and compliance programs). This is partly because they can be updated (although updates are usually signaled well in advance), but mostly because they effectively require data owners to implement technological solutions to manage their data actively.
Turning to an IT services vendor for help with this is a perfectly reasonable approach. Just remember that in the eyes of the law (and regulators), the responsibility for keeping your data safe lies with you, not any IT services vendors you use. This means that you need to ensure that you vet any potential IT services vendors very thoroughly, instruct and supervise them appropriately and have a robust and enforceable service contract in place. This is all much easier to achieve if you stick with IT services vendors who are within the jurisdiction of your local legal system.
3. The better you manage your data, the better you can manage your data backups
Most businesses stick with the tried and tested 3-2-1 approach. That means three copies of your data (including your production copy) over two media (including clouds) with one copy being kept off-site (including in a second cloud). You will store your on-site data backup in your local environment, which for most SMBs will be the cloud anyway. Your off-site backup can either be taken to physical media and transported to an off-site storage location or it can be taken to the cloud. Even in a data center, the cloud is usually by far the most sensible option.
In the cloud, there is a very direct link between consumption and costs. It, therefore, follows that the better you manage your data, the better you manage your costs. Effective data management can speed up not only your data backup process but also, and possibly, more importantly, your restore process. Effective data management essentially hinges on minimizing the data in your production system. This starts by keeping control of what goes into it in the first place.
You should already have minimized the sensitive data you collect. Minimizing the quantity of general data you collect can improve efficiency even further. When you do collect data, make sure that it is kept in a standardized format, if necessary, and if necessary, use input methods that force this, to reduce the likelihood of duplicate data which you should check rigorously. Always make sure that dormant data is identified and either deleted or moved into a data archive until it must/can be deleted.
These two steps alone can make a noticeable difference to your costs and result in a data center. The difference can be even more noticeable in the cloud. In fact, in the cloud, you can take the process a step further and use different speeds of storage for different types of data according to its priority for your immediate business needs.
4. Fine-tuning Recovery Point Objective(s) can also help to keep costs down
Recovery Point Objectives define how long you can go between data backups and hence how much data you could potentially lose. In a data center, you’re probably going to have one RPO for all data, but in the cloud, you can fine-tune this and assign different RPOs to different categories of data, thus keeping your bandwidth requirements to a minimum.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup services provider in Yuba City,
please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.
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