Data Backup Woodland

How to choose the right data backup vendor in Woodland?

Corrupt or lost data can be an absolute nightmare for any business, especially if the data is sensitive. That’s why it’s crucial to have a robust data backup plan in place. If you’re an SMB (and even if you’re not), that’s likely to mean getting a reliable data backup partner on your side. Here’s some guidance to help.

What Would Be Followed While Getting Data Backup?

1. Make sure you’re clear on where any data backup vendor is based

If you just do an internet search on “data backup in Woodland”, then your results are probably going to reflect data backup companies that offer services in Woodland. They may or may not have any sort of legal or physical presence in Woodland or even anywhere near Woodland.

It’s entirely up to you how far you’re prepared to stretch the definition of Woodland, but be careful of stretching it too far. Legally, you are responsible for any data you hold and while you can (generally) do whatever you like with your data, you are probably going to find that there are restrictions on what you can do with personal data belonging to other people – even if those other people are your employees.

In principle, you could insist that your service contract obligated your data backup vendor to treat your data according to the requirements set out in your jurisdiction. In practice, most service contracts state that the applicable law is the one in the service provider’s locality and that any disputes between you are settled by their local courts. This could render your contractual terms unenforceable either legally or practically and thus put you at risk of some difficult situations regarding the law/regulators in Woodland.

2. Think carefully about your preferred data backup strategy

These days, there are three options for backing up data. Option one is to use the “old-school” approach of backing it up onto a physical device, or, preferably, devices with one being kept on-site and the other going off-site. Option two is to back up to (another) public cloud and option three is to back up to (another) private cloud.

You can, of course, use more than one of these options in combination and you can also use them regardless of whether your system is an old-school data center, a private cloud, or a public cloud. At least, you can in principle. In practice, you will need to check what any given data backup vendor can support, particularly if you’re thinking about backing up to a cloud, especially a public cloud, where there are extra considerations you need to keep in mind.

For the sake of completeness, although having a copy of your data on a physical device can be cumbersome and raise challenges about safe storage, it can still have its uses. It may, therefore, still be worth taking occasional physical backups, even if it’s not your main data backup strategy. For the most part, however, like so much else in IT, data backups are beginning to be very much “cloud-first” if not “cloud-only”.

3. Be very aware that you need more than one backup

The traditional data backup strategy is usually known as the 3-2-1 strategy. That’s three copies of the data (one production, two backups), on two different media, one of which is kept off-site. While this strategy was devised long before the cloud and isn’t the hard-and-fast rule that it used to be, it is still acknowledged as a solid guiding principle with particular relevance to the many companies which use public cloud platforms.

Public cloud platforms generally take automatic backups and these can be hugely useful. There are, however, two good reasons for taking at least one additional backup and these both revolve around the fact that legally (and ethically), the responsibility for keeping your data safe lies with you, not the vendors you use.

The first reason is that public cloud platforms can have issues. Typically, these will be nothing more than brief outages (at least if you stick with reputable, mainstream providers) and they will be resolved so quickly it won’t be worth your while going through the restore process. In principle, however, they could be offline for extended periods. They could even disappear entirely taking your data with them. Of course, this is hugely unlikely, but it is possible.

The second reason is that public cloud platforms recognize that the data you put in them belongs to you and when it comes to how that data is treated, they follow your instructions exactly (and often instantly). This means that having an extra backup is a helpful insurance policy against staff errors (and malicious employees)
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If you’d like to talk to a reputable and experienced data backup vendor in Woodland, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.

Data Backup Davis