Data Center Backup Sacramento

What Do You Need to Know About Data Center Backup?

Although fewer and fewer companies are running their own data centers, there is still a decent sprinkling of them around. If you are responsible for one of them, then you need to ensure that the data, applications, and/or infrastructure is appropriately backed up. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data center backup in Sacramento.

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1. Data availability is now non-negotiable

There are all kinds of reasons why it makes sense to discourage (or even prevent) users from storing data on local devices (especially mobile ones). The two most obvious reasons are security and cost. Reducing or eliminating local data storage does, however, mean that IT has to stay on top of its game when it comes to ensuring that centrally-stored data is always available to users with a reasonable lead time, which, in some cases, will mean instantaneously.

Short outages can lead to complaints, long outages can lead to business failures. This means that core data at least has to be kept available even if your regular data center is not. This means that you need a business continuity/disaster recovery solution that starts with a data backup. In fact, these days, the usual starting point is an online data backup so that you can switch to a Data Center as a Service solution, while you are sorting out the issues with your regular data center.

2. You cannot rely on just backing up to hard drives (or tapes)

Both hard drives and tapes have their uses and there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking a local data center backup to either. In fact, it’s often a very sensible approach. What is, however, very definitely not sensible, is is relying purely on that single backup, especially if it’s on a hard drive (and even if it’s on a tape).

Here’s what you need to appreciate. Hard drives fail. They may not fail very often, but the more hard drives you use, the greater the odds that at least one of them will fail. Similarly, the longer you go on using a risky solution such as hard drives, the longer the odds have to catch up with you. To put this in context, hard drive failure is such a common occurrence that there is an entire industry specialized in dealing with it.

For completeness, however, even the most skilled technicians cannot guarantee to recover any of your data, let alone all of it. What’s more, just having them check a hard disk will take time and if they can recover the data it will take more time for them to do whatever they need to do plus there will be a cost involved.

Tapes are more reliable in some ways but they can break and they do degrade over time, so again, it’s risky to rely on them as your only solution.

In principle, you could deal with this issue by taking two copies of your data on your choice of physical storage and moving one copy off-site to an external storage location. This was basically what people did in the days before the cloud and the likes of DCaaS. In practice, it usually makes massively more sense just to take an online data backup with a cloud service. This is both effective and cost-effective as well as convenient.

3. There are many security issues that can impact any type of local backup

Even if someone managed to invent a storage medium that was 100% reliable, 100% of the time at least for its allocated life-cycle (if not indefinitely), there would still be a case for backing up your data center not once but twice and keeping one of the data backups off-site. This is because any sort of storage medium can fall victim to all kinds of hazards.

The three which stand out are natural disasters, physical security, and digital security. In the old days, natural disasters could destroy a business due to the expense of having to rebuild infrastructure from the ground up (plus the time needed during which you would have been losing more ground to your competitors). This was true even with insurance.

These days, that should be less of an issue due to options such as managed hosting and DCaaS. What can, however, shutter businesses permanently is the loss of irretrievable data, such as customer contacts. This is possibly the strongest, possible argument in favor of having a robust data center backup strategy, partnered with a business continuity/disaster recovery strategy that is periodically tested.

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