Online Data Backup Placerville

Need To Know About Online Data Backup Services in Placerville

If you’re already cloud-first, or even cloud-native, it makes sense to use cloud-to-cloud data backup. Even if you’re still operating a data center, it generally makes sense to use the cloud as your off-site storage location as it saves you the hassle (and time) needed to transport physical storage devices from A to B. Online data backups work much the same way as traditional data backups, but there are some differences it’s helpful to understand. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in Placerville.

1. Online data backup services are still based in the real world

You may do all your work online, but at the end of the day, your data will still be stored on a physical storage device and that physical storage device will be housed in a data center somewhere in the real world. You absolutely must know where that place is, even if it’s not, technically, a legal requirement (which it probably is if you’re holding sensitive data, including sensitive data collected from your own employees). In simple terms, you need to know that your data is being held in a place with high privacy standards and a functioning legal system.

Similarly, you want to know where any IT services vendors are located (physically and legally) so you can really judge your chances of being able to enforce the terms of any service contract between you (or seek redress if they are broken). The simple reality is that you will almost certainly be in the strongest legal position when dealing with IT services vendors who are local to you, i.e. ones who work under the same legal system and can be summoned to the same courts.

2. The better you manage your data, the more you can reduce the costs of online data backups

You aim to ensure that your production system only contains data that is both relevant and active. Relevant data is data that fulfills a purpose. Making sure all the data you hold is relevant means thinking not just about what data you collect, but also about how you collect it. The better you can enforce complete, accurate, and standardized data collection, the less likely you are to have your production system cluttered up by fragments of data and undetected duplicates.

Similarly, the better you manage your data’s life cycle, the less likely you are to have your production system clogged by data that should either be deleted or be in a data archive.

For the sake of completeness, you will also need a process to ensure that any sensitive data is deleted from a data archive once it has served its purpose (e.g. when the relevant compliance period has ended). This is likely to be a legal requirement and even if it’s not it’s both pragmatic (as it reduces your exposure to data security breaches) and ethical (if you have no further legitimate use for a person’s data, you should delete it).

Remember that the costs of holding excess production data will be multiplied by the number of copies of it that you hold (usually three in total). If that excess data then winds up in a data archive, it will generate costs there too. These will usually be much lower per data item, as data archives use very slow storage but the more excess data you accumulate and the longer you keep it, the more these costs will come to add up.

3. Online data backups allow you to fine-tune your RTOs and RPOs

If you back up your data to physical storage, you’ll probably only be able to implement one Recovery Time Objective and one Recovery Point Objective for all of your data. If, by contrast, you use online data backups, you will usually have the opportunity to split your data into different categories, according to your business objectives, and give each category its own RTO and RPO.

Data categories with the shortest RTOs and RPOs get the fastest storage and priority for bandwidth, whereas data categories with longer RTOs and RPOs can use slower storage and will need less bandwidth. This lays the foundation for a tiered recovery strategy, which aims to bring the most critical data online first so that users can get on with core tasks, while they wait for less important data to be recovered. It can also help to cut costs, or, at least, allow your budget to be deployed where it will have the most impact.

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