The concept of offsite data backup is not new; some time ago it was only
available to corporate institutions that had multiple locations, high
connectivity speeds and very high budgets. Today the cost of hardware and high
speed connectivity has greatly reduced, as a result the number of companies
offering backup to a remote location has greatly increased. For purposes of
conversation, we can call it jumping on the band wagon.
You may think the increased competition is good for the consumer, to an
extent, I agree, but not at the cost of cutting corners and jeopardising the
security of your data. We all know and agree a company's data is its most
important asset, and to lose or give access to your competition such an asset is
never an option. So please be careful where you store your data.
The general idea of offsite backup is a good one, after all it has a very low
proportionate implementation cost and as the correct system should be completely
automated the cost of ownership is also very low as well. Unlike tape backup it
is also very scalable, you can start small and grow into larger solutions as and
when you require with zero disruption but you have to be with the right offsite
backup company in the first place.
In today's data centric environment even smaller companies may have more than
one server, just for example a server for Microsoft Exchange/Lotus Notes, a
server for Microsoft SQL/Oracle/MySQL and potentially a file and print server,
or maybe a single server which carries out all tasks. Smaller companies may
still use older inherited Unix based or Novell based systems or may be
considering migrating to a lower cost Linux environment. Whet ever you currently
use or what you may use in the future your offsite backup solution will need to
adapt. Please check, what ever backup company you use, make sure they are always
developing their products for the future, your companies future.
Getting data to an offsite location is the easy bit, anybody can click and
drag to an ftp site, to optimise your backup and more importantly your recovery
times make sure your data is compressed locally or at source. The most important
element of any data transfer is security, make sure your data is encrypted
before it is transmitted and remains encrypted whilst in storage if this is the
case only your organisation will have access to your data.
In what environment is your data stored? There is no point just moving your
most important asset to another location, make sure it is totally safe, data
should only be backed up to a class 1 data centre with the highest security and
safety measures in place, hardware should be clustered so there is no single
point of failure within that data centre and for added security and peace of
mind the whole data centre and hardware within should be a replicated in real
time to a second location in preferably another country.
Imagine your local data backed up every night or when ever you wish to a
secure remote location in the UK and then replicated in real-time to a second
data centre in a different country.
Finally this whole process must be as efficient as possible. It must be
totally secure, fully automated ensuring your staff are focussed on revenue
generating functions, it must support open files enabling you to backup
regardless of what your systems are doing and it must be capable of incremental
backups, after all there is no point re-transmitting a file which has not been
accessed for a year.
So after reading this article I now hope it has made you think and understand
why the cheapest offsite backup solution is rarely the best.
For more information of how offsite backup can help your organisation please
visit www.perfectbackup.co.uk
