Cloud Data Backup In Sacramento

Cloud Data Backup Partner in Sacramento

In the old days, backing up data meant creating three copies of it on two different physical devices, securely transporting one to an off-site location, and securely storing the other on-site. Thankfully, the cloud is now here to help companies of all sizes eliminate this pain and improve the efficiency of their data backup process. Working with a good cloud data backup partner in Sacramento can make life even easier. Here are some points you need to know before you hire one.

What Do You Know About Cloud Data Backup?

1. Remember that data-protection laws apply to you, not your vendor(s)

Data protection laws apply to the company entrusted with the data. It’s then the company’s job to ensure that any vendors it uses also comply with these laws, even if they do not apply where the vendor is located. In principle, you can make this happen by making it a contractual obligation. In practice, contracts only have value if they can be enforced and the further away from you a vendor is located, the harder it can be to enforce a contract.

This means that if you are looking for cloud data backup services in Sacramento, it’s a good idea to check where a potential cloud-data backup partner is legally and physically based. In other words, is a potential cloud-data backup partner actually located in Sacramento or just offering services in Sacramento, but based elsewhere?

If the latter, how far away from Sacramento are they? For example, you might be willing to stretch a point for a cloud data backup partner in places like Elk Grove, Lodi, and Woodland, but you should probably think long and hard before stretching it out much further such as out of state or out of the country. At the end of the day, you will be the one in the sights of law enforcers and regulators if anything goes wrong and you might not find it as easy as you would have liked to get recompense from a vendor in another jurisdiction.

2. Make sure you understand all terms of a proposed contract

In addition to making sure you know who you’re dealing with and where they are, you will also need to know all relevant proposed terms. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is with the actual process itself, which should be along the lines of collect, compress, encrypt and transfer. You want to know the details of each stage (especially the encryption stage) and, if there are various options, what the SLAs and prices are for each.

Speaking of prices, you will certainly want to know the full details of the pricing model (and payment terms). The price you pay might be based on storage, bandwidth, the number of users, the number of devices to be backed up, the number of servers used to hold the data backups, and/or the number of times data is accessed. It may well be a combination of various factors.

3. Check how the vendor protects against erroneous deletion

In principle, a cloud data backup vendor will protect their platform against external threats and it’s down to each client to protect their own data from internal threats, such as erroneous deletion, accidental or malicious. In practice, a good cloud-data backup partner will help their clients to help themselves by providing tools and supporting processes that enhance security.

Robust access control is a must and while it is largely down to the client to decide who gets access to what (and when), there are two services to look out for to help with access management. One is the ability to disable logins quickly. Basically, if you know, or even suspect, that an account has been compromised, then the only pragmatic approach is to disable it as quickly as possible and start again. The other is two-factor authentication.

4. Check the restore process(es)

The whole point of undertaking data backups is so that you can restore from them if you need to. You, therefore, need to see what option(s) your cloud data backup partner can offer for this and how they fit in with your systems and processes.

5. Check if your vendor can help identify dormant data

The fact that you do not need to transport and store physical media means that it can be quite easy for data just to accumulate in the cloud and this can have many negative implications. For example, you are probably going to end up paying extra for storing data you don’t need and this extra data will slow down your restore process (and probably increase the costs due to the extra bandwidth used). You, therefore, want to do what you can to identify dormant data and either delete it or archive it.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable cloud data backup partner in Sacramento, please click here now to speak to Aperio.IT.