Tech Pro Space LLC
Tech Pro Space LLC

How Can Managed Backups Help Your Business?

12/03/2021 06:35 PM By Vicente Agama

If you run a business. You know how critical your data is to your company. Imagine if you lost all your customers and company data. You will be so glad if you regularly backup your data.

A backup plan is like your business insurance.

Backups are no different from any other insurance policy. It's just like car insurance. You may not need it, but when you need it. You really need it. You hope you never need it. When disaster strikes. You will be glad you have backups ready to help you recover from disaster.

How much data can you afford to lose? This is a business decision. How quickly do you need to recover data if a disaster strikes? This is a technical decision. A backup plan is a process that gives you the ability to recover from data loss at an acceptable cost and within a specified timeframe.

Your computers or servers will in time have issues. That is why it is important to have a backup plan in place to recover when it happens. If you do not have a solid backup plan. You could lose data that is important to your company.

Every business needs its data. Whether you are big or small. Your data is essential to your success. One of the most important things about backing up your data is that it must be protected and recoverable.

You should put a backup schedule in place that includes when backups are done, how often they are done, and how long each takes.

Backups are essential to the survival of any company. Not only do backups protect against data loss, but they also safeguard against hardware failures and other unforeseen problems.

Cloud or local backup. Which is better?

Local backups are quick to backup and recover because the data is on your network where data transfers are faster. The speed and time of backup and recovery will depend on what backup software vendor you are using and the size of the data.

The negatives with local backups is your responsible for the hardware if it fails or has issues. You need to maintain the hardware and monitor it to ensure it is working properly. Having your own device will be more expensive in the long run.

You have to provide physical security with local backups because you do not want your storage device exposed to where someone can steal or cause damage. With cloud backups. You don’t have to worry about physical security because cloud storage datacenters already provide it.

With cloud backups you do not have to worry about hardware failures because they have numerous redundancies. The storage devices are monitored and maintained. You do not have to spend a substantial amount of money on your own hardware or manage it. Cloud storage is inexpensive.

Cloud backups can serve as offsite backups. So if a natural disaster happens in your area. You have a copy of your data elsewhere.

The downside to cloud backups is that not every company has access to fast and reliable internet connections. The data might be too big to upload. But there are options. Most cloud storage vendors have services where they will send you a storage device to upload your data. Then you send it back to them to upload it on your cloud storage. That will help with the bulk of the data if its terabytes or petabytes.

Test your backup solution before relying on it

To ensure that you have an effective backup. You should test your backups by performing restores. In doing so you will be able to verify that all data was restored successfully and that the servers or files are ready to go into production.

Encrypt your backups

By now, you have your data backed up. But if you are not encrypting your backups, are you really secure?

Data can be stolen by anyone. If you do not encrypt your backup files, anyone who gets their hands on the data will be able to see all of the information it contains. Fortunately most backup solutions enable you to encrypt files with unique passwords before they are saved. Once the data is encrypted. The data is useless without the passwords to unlock it.

Now that we've reached the end

You need to ensure you are doing regular backups of all your important business data. 

Many companies continue to struggle with the question of whether they should run their own backup systems, or replace all local servers with cloud storage and put their files in the cloud.

A managed backup service can give you the assurance that your data is being backed up and stored properly. If you lack the time and knowledge to manage the backups yourself. You should consider choosing a managed IT services company to take care of it for your company.

Vicente Agama