Data Backup Storage Auburn

What do you need to know about data backup storage in Auburn?

It’s vital to choose the right data backup storage for your company’s needs. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in Auburn.

Thinks To be Considered While Data Backup Storage

1. You need twice as much storage for your data backups as you do for your production data

The accepted standard for data backups is known as the 3-2-1 strategy. Traditionally, this is defined as having three copies of your data over two media with one copy being kept off-site. These days, “media” often means “clouds”, but essentially the principle holds good. The key point to note is that you need to allocate twice as much storage to your data backups as you do to your production data.

2. Cleaning your data will reduce the amount of storage you need

This is most relevant in the cloud but is becoming increasingly relevant to companies still running data centers. Collecting and/or generating data just “because reasons” is the way to end up with a whole lot of data you neither need nor want but which carries a cost and, potentially, a security risk (especially if it’s personal, sensitive, and/or confidential).

The cost is most evident if you’re using the cloud, where you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. Even in data centers, however, you generally want to avoid unnecessary expenditures. You also need to be aware of the “stealth costs”, including, and arguably especially, the cost of the extra time needed to back up and recover excess data.

As an absolute minimum, move dormant data out of production. If you’re not confident to delete it, then at least put it in a data archive. This alone can result in significant cost savings (in the cloud). It can also massively speed up your backup and recovery processes.

3. Organizing your data will allow you to use your storage effectively

Again, this is most relevant (and easiest) in the cloud, but is also meaningful for data centers. If you can segment your data in a way that reflects your business priorities, you can fine-tune your use of storage to prioritize the data you need most urgently.

In the cloud, you can simply choose different speeds of storage in your production environment and use these choices to inform your Recovery Time Objectives and hence the speeds of storage you use for your data backups.

In a data center, you are probably going to use the same physical medium for all your local data backups. You can, however, still segment and organize your data so that you bring whole servers back online in a sequence which reflects your business priorities. Additionally, if you’re using the cloud as your off-site data storage location, you can fine-tune your use of storage there.

4. It’s important to think about where your storage facility is located

If you’re backing up purely to physical media then you’ll presumably either hold it in your own data center or arrange for it to be transported to an off-site storage facility. In either case, you’ll know exactly where it’s residing.

If, however, you’re using the cloud, you need to make sure you understand where your data is being held. In some cases, you may be able to choose this directly from a management console(for example AWS regions). In other cases, however, you may need to confirm this information with the vendor. You definitely want to write confirmation of where your data is stored and these days it is often very much preferable to make it an enforceable contractual obligation for your vendor to store your data in a location that is acceptable to you.

On a similar note, if you’re planning on using IT services vendors, you need to know where they are located, legally and physically. Quite bluntly, this could make a significant difference to your ability to enforce your contract through legal action if you ever needed to do so.

5. If you’re in a data center, remember hard drives are very delicate

At present, if you’re running your own data center, then your choice of the physical storage medium is effectively tapes or hard drives. SSDs may be a viable option in the future, but right now they are too expensive to be an option for many companies.

Tapes are very robust, but they are also expensive to implement (due to the need to buy supporting hardware such as tape drives), slow and impossible to search effectively. Hard drives, by contrast, are much more affordable to implement, much faster, and can be searched effectively, but they are very delicate. This means that if you are using them, the safest option is to keep them for your local backup and use either tapes or the cloud for your off-site backup.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup storage partner in Auburn, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.