Data Backup Storage Lodi

Things To Be Know About data backup storage in Lodi

A lot of business management involves balancing performance against cost. This is certainly true of data backup management. Data backup storage plays a major role in determining data backup costs, so it’s important to use it appropriately. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in Lodi.

Role Of Data Backup Storage

1. Most companies will need local data backup storage and off-site data backup storage

The principle of having a local data backup and an off-site data backup dates back to long before the cloud and still holds good today. It is, however, important to understand that your main cloud is considered to be “local” even if the infrastructure is located off-site. In other words, you also need a second data backup stored somewhere else. For practical purposes, this usually means in a (different) public cloud.

If you’re running your own data center, you will take your local data backup to physical media. In principle, you can also take your off-site data back to physical media. In practice, however, the public cloud is usually the most sensible option here too.

2. Using physical media for data backup storage

For businesses, there are currently only two physical media that make sense for use as data backup storage. These are tapes and hard drives. SSDs may become a realistic option in the future, but they will probably have to come down in price substantially before they become a realistic option for the average SMB.

At this point, it’s probably fair to say that tapes are only used by companies that invested in the necessary hardware (e.g. tape drives) a long time ago and want to maximize the return on this investment. The tapes themselves are affordable, robust, and reliable. The problem is that they are also painfully slow and cannot be easily searched.

It’s possible to improve the performance of tapes by running data through an SSD before loading it onto tape. The SSD buffers deduplicate and compress the data before sending it forward before sending it forward. This results in a significant gain in the data backup process and some gain in the recovery process. Even so, tapes are still slower than hard drives.

SMBs which are implementing new solutions (or updating old ones) tend to prefer hard drives. These require less upfront investment, are simple to install and use, fast and searchable. In fact, you can even buy all-in-one solutions that manage your data backups and provide data backup storage. The main issue with hard drives is that their internal mechanics means that they need very careful handling.

This isn’t necessarily a huge issue in a data center. It can, however, become a major issue if you want to transport them to and from off-site storage. Tapes are much better suited to this but have many other drawbacks. This means that the obvious choice is to go for the cloud. Private clouds are relatively expensive to run and hence would be uneconomical for use purely as a data backup storage solution or even as a data backup storage solution and a business continuity/disaster recovery solution. The public cloud, therefore, is the obvious choice.

3. Using the public cloud for data backup storage

One of the reasons why companies can be nervous about the public cloud is that it leaves you very much dependent on your public cloud vendor. While this is a fair point, if you undertake appropriate due diligence on your cloud vendor, you should be perfectly safe to use the public cloud as a data backup storage location and may even be able to use it as a full (and very cost-effective) business continuity/disaster recovery solution.

It’s important to check where a public cloud vendor is located (both legally and physically) and where, exactly, your data would reside. Similarly, you will also want to check the legal and physical locations of any remote staff or freelancers you use and also of any IT services vendors you use. In fact, if your IT services vendors use remote staff and/or freelancers (or other third-party agents) and they have contact with your data, you’ll want to know their geographical location too.

Ideally, you want to stick to working with vendors who are prepared to make contractual agreements about where your data can be held and who can access it (and from where). Both major cloud vendors and local IT services vendors should be able to accommodate this.

In addition to all of the above, you will generally want to keep your data encrypted until it is either retrieved, deleted, or needed for use in the public cloud itself.

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