Data Backup Services Roseville

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

Data is essential to most modern businesses. Even traditional industries, which might not initially seem “data-driven”, typically do have at least some core data to which they need reliable access. For increasing numbers of businesses, data is a huge part of what they do. In fact, it may even be at the heart of what they do. This means that all companies, however small, need a data backup process that is both effective and affordable. With that in mind, here is what you need to know about data backup services in Roseville.

Steps To get Data Backup

The cleaner data is, the easier it is to back up

You could say that your data backup process begins before you even enter the data into your production system. The more you do to minimize the quantity of data you collect, the easier it will be to back up the data you do have. This has two implications. Firstly, you need to be sure that you are only collecting data you genuinely need. This is especially true when it comes to the collection of sensitive data, which includes any sensitive data you collect from your company employees. Secondly, it means you need to take steps to eliminate duplicate data items and poor-quality data.

The way to achieve the first goal is to be very mindful of what data you request and to be very clear about why you are requesting it. The way to achieve the second goal (or at least to give yourself the best chance of achieving it), is to enforce standardized and accurate data entry as much as you possibly can. This is typically done by designing user interfaces in a way that guides users to the correct format and by supplementing this with data validation as far as reasonably possible.

It is important to separate active data and dormant data

A data backup is a snapshot of the data in your production system. This should be the data you are actually using, hence active data. As soon as data becomes dormant, it should be removed from your production systems. If you know it’s needed for compliance (or nobody’s willing to take responsibility for deleting it), then put it in a data archive.

This is extremely important both from the perspective of minimizing the time need to back up your data (and possibly more importantly, the time needed to restore from your data backups) and from the perspective of minimizing costs. Assuming you are using the 3-2-1 strategy (three copies of your data, over two media/clouds, with one copy being kept off-site/in a secondary cloud), then the dormant data will be using up three rounds of fast storage when it shouldn’t be using any.

Then there’s the effect on the amount of bandwidth you need to perform your data backups and any restores you do. Assuming you are managing your data backup strategy appropriately, this should be less severe, but it will still be an extra cost you could have avoided.

All data backups (and archives) must comply with data protection laws/regulations

While this may seem like stating the obvious, it takes active management to make sure that this happens in practice rather than just being a good intention. In the context of data backups possibly the single biggest point to note is that you need a mechanism to track all data items across their life-cycle and including your data backups and your data archives.

This is fundamental to ensuring that any data which must be deleted is deleted (e.g. sensitive data which has ceased to be needed) and similarly that any data which needs to be kept (e.g. for compliance purposes) is kept for the appropriate length of time and then promptly deleted. If it is beyond the capability of your in-house resources, then you can (and arguably must) get an IT services vendor to help.

Knowing your data can help you fine-tune your RTOs and RPOs

RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective and RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. Your RTO defines how quickly you need your data back online and your RPO defines how long you can go between data backups. In the old world of data centers, practicality generally dictated that you had one RTO and one RPO for all of your data.

In the cloud, however, you can organize your data into categories according to how it fits into your business priorities and then assign each category its own RTO and RPO. This can be a great way to speed up the return to core operations while still keeping costs manageable.

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

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