Online Data Backup Folsom

A quick guide to online data backup services in Folsom

For many SMBs, Online Data Backup Folsom isn’t just the most sensible option, they’re the only realistic option. If you’re working in the cloud, you may not have access to the physical infrastructure to connect offline storage devices. Even if you did, what would be the point of downloading your data to a physical device only to have to upload it back to a cloud before you could use it?

Online data backups work very similarly to offline data backups, but there are some nuances it can be helpful to note, especially if you want to keep costs down. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to online data backup services in Folsom.

Online Data Backup Folsom

What Do You Know About Online Data Backup?

1. You need to implement robust data governance

There needs to be a chain of custody for all sensitive data. At any given moment, you should be able to check your systems and know who has access to (or even contact with) your data and where it is both in transit and at rest. Both points are extremely important as these days they can have major legal implications. You won’t have your own physical storage devices to track so you need to rely on your data governance.

When thinking of this, remember that you are responsible for any data you own. If anything happens to it, law enforcement/regulators will sanction you, not your IT services vendors. You, therefore, have to undertake careful due diligence on any IT services vendors you are thinking of using and make sure that this is backed by a watertight service contract. Your service contract needs to be enforceable to be meaningful, so for the average SMB, the safest option by far is to stick to local vendors who operate under the same legal system as you.

2. You need to be able to track data through its life-cycle

A lot of data has a life cycle. It typically starts as production data, may move on to archived data, and ultimately ends up as deleted data. You must be able to manage this process effectively for sensitive data and data which is required for compliance purposes (which may also be sensitive data). It is very much recommended to be able to track all data throughout its life cycle.

Remember that in the cloud and with online data backups, there is a direct link between consumption and costs. In other words, if you have excess data hanging around your production system, you’ll have excess costs for your production system and these costs will then be multiplied across your online data backups of which there will normally be two.

As an absolute minimum, therefore, you need to be able to identify data that is being actively used from data that is lying dormant. The latter needs to be moved promptly out of your production systems. If you know it can’t/should can’t be deleted or nobody is prepared to authorize the deletion, then at least move it into a data archive.

For completeness, you will then need a process to delete data from the archive when it expires. This is usually mandatory for sensitive data (and even if it isn’t it’s both ethical and good business practice). It’s highly recommended for all data both to control costs and to reduce your exposure to data breaches.

3. You can use different speeds of storage for different types of data

In the world of traditional data backups, the theoretical advantages of choosing your storage medium to suit your data types were often negated by the practicalities of buying storage media. In simple terms, financially, it often made the most sense just to bulk-buy “one-size-fits-all-more-or-less” storage media.

In the cloud, however, you can fine-tune your choice of storage to reflect the speed at which you need your data. If you adjust this to your liking (financially and practically) in your production system, you can then replicate the settings for your online data backups to make further savings there.

4. Remember the importance of bandwidth

When thinking about online data backups, possibly the most obvious cost is the cost of storage, but bandwidth matters too and you can keep your costs down by learning to use it astutely. Just as you can choose different speeds of storage for different types of data, so you can also choose different Recovery Point Objectives for different categories of data.

RPOs define how often your data needs to be backed up. Shorter RPOs require more bandwidth than longer ones, so you would ideally keep them for data that is updated regularly and, of course, vice versa.

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