Data Backup Storage Woodland

What do you need to know about data backup storage in Woodland?

All businesses need to make protecting their data one of their top priorities. This means having a robust data backup strategy and implementing it using the right tools for the job. Your choice of data backup storage will be an integral part of this. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in Woodland.

Requirements for Data Backup Storage

You need twice the amount of data backup storage space as you do production space

As a rule of thumb, you want two data backups. One will be held locally and the other off-site. This means that, in total, you need about twice the amount of data storage space as you do production storage space.

Data backup management starts in your production systems

A data backup is essentially a carbon copy of your production systems. Therefore, anything you do to improve the way your production data is managed will also improve your data backup process.

The most obvious step you can take here is minimizing the amount of production data you hold. This means thinking carefully about what data you collect/generate. It also means ensuring that dormant data is moved swiftly out of production. If you can’t delete it then archive it. This will prevent you from ending up with three copies of data that didn’t need to be in your production systems in the first place.

The second step you can take is to make sure you have a clear overview of your data and understand how it all fits into your business. If you’re working in the cloud you can segment the data in your production systems and assign it to different speeds of storage depending on how quickly it is needed.

This may not be feasible if you’re running a data center, but you can still aim to segment your data in a way that allows you to bring whole servers online in an organized sequence rather than just recovering data randomly across servers until eventually, they are ready to come online.

The public cloud is generally the most sensible place for your off-site data backups

If you’re already working in the public cloud, then using a second public cloud as a data backup storage location makes obvious sense. What may be less obvious is that it is generally the most sensible choice for companies using a private cloud or a data center.

If you’re running a private cloud, then you probably want to keep all your data in an online environment. In principle, you could run a second private cloud and have it function both as a data backup storage location and as a business continuity/disaster recovery solution. This has all kinds of advantages in terms of minimizing recovery time and maximizing convenience. Unfortunately, it is also too expensive to be a viable option for most SMBs.

It is much more affordable to use the public cloud as a data backup storage location and then transfer data to a private cloud that you activate as needed. You might even consider forgoing a second private cloud and just using the public cloud both to store your data backups and as your Plan B in the event of issues with your usual private cloud. This would involve giving up some level of privacy and control, but it would only be on a short-term basis and could significantly reduce your costs.

Similar comments apply to SMBs which are running their own data centers. Taking off-site data backups to physical storage does give them complete protection against cyberattacks. It does, however, expose them to the usual dangers of transit (e.g. loss, damage, and theft) as well as to the usual dangers of storage (also loss, damage, and theft).

What’s more, it delays your recovery due to the need to fetch a physical device from storage. This last point is particularly relevant in urban areas such as Woodland, where traffic congestion is likely to be far more of an issue than internet congestion.

Local data backups in data centers

In a data center, you’ll be taking your local backups to physical media. For practical purposes, this means tapes or hard drives. At a push, you could include SSDs, but currently, these are so expensive that there are probably very few SMBs that could afford to use them as their main solution.

Tapes are economical over the long term, robust and reliable. Sadly, they’re also very slow and cannot be searched easily. Hard drives are priced very affordably, are easy to implement, much faster and searchable. They are, however, much less robust than tapes. This isn’t necessarily a huge issue in a data center but could be a major concern if you need to transport them to and from off-site storage.

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