Top Best Online Data Backup Woodland

A quick guide to online data backup services in Woodland

There are many reasons for modern companies to prefer online data backup services to traditional, offline backups. Most of these revolve around the fact that they eliminate the need for companies to have to manage physical storage media, either on-site or off-site. In general terms, online data backups work much the same way as traditional data backups. There are, however, some differences and it can be helpful to understand them. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to online data backup services in Woodland.

1. With online data backup services, you pay for exactly what you use

In financial terms, this is probably the single, biggest difference between traditional data backups and online data backup services. With traditional data backups, you buy storage once and then use it as you wish until its useful life is ended. Although keeping excess data meant that you paid additional costs for physical storage media, the fact that physical storage media has been priced very affordably for many years now meant that the financial impact of accumulating data was negligible.

With online data backups, by contrast, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. This means that there is a very direct, obvious, and measurable penalty to keeping excess data. What’s more, that penalty is multiplied over each copy of the data. For example, if you’re working on the 3-2-1 strategy and keeping three copies of your data over two media (clouds) with one copy being held off-site (in a different cloud), then you will be charged three times for your data. If this data then goes into a data archive, you will be charged for that as well.

If you want to look at this more positively, it means that you can benefit from practicing robust data governance.

2. Prioritize the management of your sensitive data

You should be doing this already, but if not you need to start immediately. Even if you’re not already breaking data protection laws/compliance programs, you probably soon will be. If you think you’re not holding sensitive data, then you may want to double-check to be sure, particularly since the definition of sensitive data extends to any personal data you collect from your employees. 

If you think you’ve already tightened up the management of your sensitive data as far as it can go, look at your user interfaces and see how good a job a job they do of guiding users (internal and/or external) into entering full and accurate data. The most obvious points to check are the structure of the data-entry fields (e.g. free-text versus defined input) and validation. 

It is, however, also a good idea to see whether or not it is obvious why you are requesting this information. Being clear about the purpose for which data will be used can encourage people to enter genuine information, as opposed to data that gets past automated validation checks.

If you identify issues with your data collection, then there is a good chance that you have fragments and/or duplicates of data items floating around your production system. This is both a security risk and an expense, so you need to deal with it.

3. Make sure you’re clear about what data is needed for compliance purposes

Your next priority should usually be the management of data that is needed for compliance purposes. Some of this may also be considered sensitive data. This data will have to be kept somewhere until the compliance period has ended. If it is sensitive, then typically it will be obligatory to delete it immediately afterward (unless you have a legally-acceptable justification for keeping it). If it is not sensitive, you may choose to keep it, but remember, if you do, you’re going to be paying storage costs for it.

4. You can choose different speeds of storage for different kinds of data

In the old world of data centers and offline backups, it was theoretically possible to have different speeds of storage for different kinds of data. It was, however, often impractical for all kinds of reasons, including, ironically enough, cost and storage space. 

In the modern world of the cloud, by contrast, it’s easy to choose different speeds of storage according to different categories of data. What’s more, you can implement this granular approach to storage across both your production system and your online data backups. This can go a long way to keeping costs manageable while still ensuring that end-users get the data they need in a reasonable time frame.

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