Online Data Backup Elk Grove

What you need to know about online data backup services in Elk Grove

Modern businesses, especially SMBs, are increasingly not just using the cloud but leveraging the cloud. It’s more than just a cost-effective way to deliver IT infrastructure. It’s a way to develop your business and better serve your staff and customers. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in Elk Grove.

It literally pays to implement robust data management

When you are working in data centers and using offline data backups, storage is just something you buy and use, probably without all that much thought. It’s been priced very affordably for years, even more so if you get bulk deals. This means that there’s very little in the way of direct, financial reward for making the effort to manage your data beyond the sort of basic data governance which is required by law, e.g. appropriately protecting sensitive data and ensuring that data needed for compliance is kept in a suitable location for the correct length of time.

In the cloud, however, and with online data backups, you pay for what you use for however long you use it. This means that companies which manage their data well will be well rewarded for it. Those who are prepared to get to grips with the nuances of the cloud and online data backups will be rewarded even further.

There is a direct link between storage speed and storage costs

In the world of traditional data backups, for the most part, you very probably used one type of storage for everything. At most, you might have different storage for your regular data backups and your data archives and possibly some data given special treatment for a particular reason. In the cloud, however, the cost of storage is directly linked to its speed. This means that, as a minimum, you need to get dormant data out of your production system as quickly as possible. If you have to keep it, then put it into a data archive.

Ideally, however, you’ll fine-tune this even further so that the speed of the storage you use reflects how long users can reasonably be expected to wait for the data. For example, if you’re using the cloud for customer service, then you’re probably going to want the data used by your customer service agents to be in the fastest storage you can find (or at least the fastest storage you can afford). 

By contrast, if you know that a given department, let’s say finance, batch-processes jobs at certain times, you can put the data they need into slow storage and make them aware that they need to request it from storage long before they require it. This may require a change to their processes but it could be well worth it. For example, if they’re currently running the job on Mondays and Wednesdays, you could have them change to Tuesdays and Thursdays so they can request the data before they leave for the evening on Mondays and Wednesdays.

If you then replicate this approach across your online data backups as well, you’ll save yourself money there too. These savings can really add up. For example, if you’re using the standard 3-2-1 approach (three copies of your data, including your production copy over two media/clouds with one copy being off-site/in a second cloud), then they will roll up over all three copies, plus you’ll save on bandwidth. This last point should not be overlooked, especially for your off-site copy.

You can also fine-tune your recovery point objectives

A recovery point objective essentially defines how much data you feel you need to be able to recover if there is an outage to your systems or, to put it another way, how often you need to take your online data backups. Again, in the world of traditional data backups, you would typically have just one RPO for all your production data (data archives would probably be different). With online data backups, however, you can have different RPOs for different categories of data.

 This matters because every time you take an online data backup, you use bandwidth (and again if you recover from your data backup). You are probably going to be charged for at least some of this bandwidth, at least for the data transfer between your main cloud and your secondary cloud. Fine-tuning your RPO settings can, therefore, help to keep costs as low as possible by saving your bandwidth usage for where it matters most.

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