Offsite Backup – Be Very careful who you deal with!
By Lee Morrell
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 About the Author Lee Morrell is a specialist data backup advisor for small to medium size companies
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