Online Data Backup Auburn

What do you need to know about data backup in Auburn?

As the cloud has grown in popularity, so have online data backups. They can also be useful to people who are still running data centers as they offer a convenient way to manage off-site data backups. Although the basic principles of online data backups are the same as traditional data backups, there are some key differences in how they work in practice. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup in Auburn.

1. It is crucial to know your IT services vendors

Most companies, even SMBs, are going to be handling some level of sensitive data if only the personal data they collect from their employees. Even if you’re not, technically, in a regulated industry, this data is very likely to be under legal and regulator protection.  You probably also have data that is not subject to legal/regulatory oversight, but which you would prefer to keep confidential.

This means that you absolutely must know who is dealing with your data and, specifically, where they are based (legally and physically) and where your data is held. First of all, there could be legal restrictions on where in the world you can store your data. Secondly, you need to know that your service contract has meaning. For practical purposes, you need to know that it will be acceptable in a court of law, that you can get the other party into a court of law, and that you have a decent chance of enforcing any judgment awarded to you by a court of law.

All of this is much easier if you stick to local vendors. This means you want to check early on if an online data backup services vendor is in Auburn, or at least near Auburn, or if they are just offering services in Auburn, but are located elsewhere. You also need to check where they plan to hold your data (as this may be different).

2. You can usually store sensitive data in a public cloud

If you’re working in a private cloud (or a data center), you can usually store your online data backups in a private cloud, so long as you encrypt them on your servers first (which you would have to do anyway). These days, it may also be possible for you to use a public cloud as a disaster recovery solution.

The reason for this is that the mainstream public clouds are increasingly likely to be compliant with at least the mainstream data protection laws and compliance programs. This means that, in theory, even companies in regulated industries could use these public clouds as their everyday solution. Of course, in practice, this is still likely to be a step too far for many (although possibly not all) such companies, however, it might be worth investigating whether you could decrypt your data in a public cloud for use on a short-term basis, e.g. for disaster recovery.

3. You must control your data to control your costs

This is also true of traditional data backups, however, the direct financial impact of poor data management was much lower. Physical storage has been priced very affordably for a very long time so even SMBs on tight budgets were unlikely to be too bothered about having to buy a bit more (or even a lot more) than they would have needed if they had sorted out their data management. The tightening of data protection laws did encourage businesses to apply robust data governance to their sensitive data, but not necessarily to their general data.

In the cloud, however, you pay for what you use as you use it. This means that the cost of excess data is multiplied over time and also multiplied over each copy of the data that you hold. Assuming you’re applying a 3-2-1 strategy (that’s three copies of your data over two media with one copy being kept off-site), that’s three rounds of excess storage costs, plus the bandwidth needed to move the data from the production environment into the data backup environments.

If you identify dormant data in your production systems and you’re not confident deleting it, then at least move it to a data archive. This is not the best practice. You should know why you’re keeping something and if you don’t have a reason to keep it you should delete it. In the real world, however, it can be a fairly pragmatic approach to keeping costs down if you must hold on to data nobody seems to be using (and which is outside the scope of compliance).

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