Data Backup Services Davis

What do you need to know about data backup services in Davis?

For businesses in the 21st century, protecting access to data probably ranks just behind protecting cash-flow when it comes to ensuring their survival. Fortunately, even SMBs can implement a robust data backup strategy without breaking the bank. With that in mind, here’s what you need to know about data backup services in Davis.

Where To Start Data Backup Services?

Everything starts with knowing your data

Even in a data center, you need to be able to identify certain key characteristics of data items. Above all, you must be able to identify sensitive data and data which may be needed for compliance purposes (which can include sensitive data). You also need to be able to identify what is active (production) data versus what is dormant data and what dormant data needs to be archived versus what can be safely deleted.

The main reason for doing all of this is to keep you on the right side of the law, which arguably also acts as a cost-control measure. It may also help to reduce the costs and increase the efficiency of your data backup strategy, but probably not to the extent that it can in the cloud. In the cloud, there is a very direct link between consumption and costs. There is, therefore, a very direct benefit to making sure that you use resources as efficiently as possible.

As an absolute minimum, you need to be rigorous about deleting or archiving dormant data. If you archive it you then have to be rigorous about deleting sensitive data when the compliance period has ended and preferably you will also have a robust process for determining what general data you really want to keep (for example as a historical record) versus what can be safely deleted after the compliance period has ended.

You may wish to take this a step further and categorize your data according to its importance to your business so that you can manage different categories of data in different ways. This can not only reduce costs but also increase the efficiency of your business.

Knowing your data will inform your RPO(s) and RTO(s)

RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective and RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective. In short, RPO defines how long you are prepared to go between backups, hence, how much data you are prepared to risk losing, and RTO defines how quickly you need to get your backups into your production system after an event (of any sort). In a data center, you’re probably going to have one RPO and one RTO for all of your data production data. In a cloud, by contrast, you can have different RPOs and RTOs for different types of data.

While this obviously takes more work than just creating one RPO and one RTO for all your data, it can be a great way to hit the sweet spot between maximizing productivity (by having your most critical data backed up regularly and brought back online as quickly as possible), without going overboard on costs (by being prepared to accept that your less critical data will be backed up less frequently and restored more slowly).

Your data backup strategy will feed into your disaster recovery strategy

A disaster recovery strategy is essentially a data backup strategy plus a strategy for providing your staff members with everything they need to work with the data, for example, an operating system and applications.

Under the traditional 3-2-1 system, you will have three copies of your data (including your production copy) over two media (clouds) with one being kept off-site (in a second cloud). This last is probably going to be the one you need for disaster recovery and at present regardless of your standard IT environment, using a cloud to hold your off-site data backup is almost always the right move.

If you are already working in a public cloud, then it’s hard to see how there could be a more cost-effective or more efficient solution than just taking your off-site data backup to a second public cloud and adding whatever is necessary to make it a complete disaster recovery solution.

If you are in a data center or a private cloud, then you may be able to use the public cloud as a disaster recovery solution (or at least part of one) as public clouds are increasingly likely to be compliant with at the least the major data protection laws and the main data compliance programs. Even if you can’t, you can almost always use it as a cost-effective location to store encrypted data backups for transmission to your disaster recovery location/cloud.

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

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