Why you should be using an Offsite Backup Service
Keeping a regular backup of your computers and storage systems prevents data loss, but to completely protect databases, email archives and other critically important data, businesses should keep at least two separate backups including one offsite backup.
An offsite backup is a copy of key files and folders kept in a separate physical location from your primary storage device. From a disaster recovery viewpoint, there are several key advantages to offsite file storage.
Protection From Natural Disasters
One of the more obvious advantages of an offsite backup is the protection that users gain from natural events. If you cannot access your computer or storage system for any reason, you can use the offsite copy to restore your data in the meantime.
Offsite backups have provided some businesses with essential protection from downtime following major fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. In some cases, this protection is worth millions of dollars, particularly if the backup copy is recent and productivity losses are minimal following the failure.
Avoiding Logical Data Issues
Offsite backups also protect against logical data disasters in RAID-dependent or networked systems. For example, if your business keeps a primary copy of data on a RAID array and an automatic onsite backup, logical file damage could potentially affect both copies of the file. By keeping a separate offsite backup, your business could avoid data loss in this type of scenario.
Logical file issues account for a large percentage of commercial data loss events, and a good backup plan uses an offsite copy to prevent viruses, user errors and software errors from causing data loss.
Setting Up Offsite Backups
Choosing an appropriate backup program or service can provide you with peace of mind. A good offsite backup is automatic, consistent and reliable.
Depending on whether you need to store a small or large amount of data, you may be able to use a cloud-based service to maintain an accessible offsite backup. Cloud services are a reliable option for personal computer users, and many services offer automatic software that uploads changed files from the user’s computer once per day. Most cloud services also offer state-of-the-art data encryption to ensure secure file transfers.
Businesses with large storage systems often prefer physical offsite backups. This can include data tape cartridge libraries, NAS and SAN devices, and other large-scale archival systems. Ideally, these offsite backups should not be in the same regional area as the original copy of the data. Otherwise, major natural events such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes may prevent you from accessing critically important files in both locations.
We all know that offsite data backup is something we should be doing. But, it’s not something that we all do. Cloud backup services are an insurance policy to protect your data from any number of data loss threats. It gives you peace of mind.
Consider the following data loss situations. They are all too common and could send your business down the drain if an offsite backup solution is not in place.
Deleting files: Updating files or deleting them are common activities. We often lose data simply because we don’t have proper workflow procedures and backup strategies. More efficient procedures for saving work and making backups regularly will definitely save time.
Viruses & malware: New viruses attack computers every day. Damages greatly differ, but most viruses affect operational systems and damage stored data. Making regular backups of your data and storing the data safely offsite allows you to access it after severe virus attacks.
Mechanical damages: Computer hardware is a fragile part of business networks. There are ways to recover data, but this service can be costly. There’s no guarantee you can totally recover your important data. Regular offsite backups help in case of hardware troubles and keeps the latest version of your data in safe storage.
Power failures: Power failures affect operation systems and computer hardware. Suddenly shutting your computer or business systems down without proper procedures causes problems. This leads to a chain reaction, and your data is gone. Offsite data backups makes you feel better and more secure, keeping data in a safe place where you can recover it.
Computer theft: It’s a tragedy to lose both your computer and data at the same time. While traveling, you may leave your laptop unattended, lose it in an airport, conference center, coffee shop or any other crowded place. New computers cost money, but the data lost is even more expensive. If you use a proper offsite data backup strategy, you can recover your data even after your computer is long gone.
Fire & explosions: Explosions rarely happen, but fire mostly likely destroys both your computer and data. Fire is also dangerous when backups are stored in the same location. The safest practice against fire is to make regular backups and keep them in the cloud.
In all these cases, another factor to consider is the cost of data recovery. The cost of professional recovery can be considerably more than maintaining an offsite backup. The best data recovery case is one that uses a reliable, offsite backup solution.
Businesses suffer not only the financial devastations caused by data loss, but they can suffer the loss of client confidence. Both are equally devastating and determine whether a business can survive.
More than one-third of Ransomware attacks are on businesses with fewer than 250 employees.
There’s a lot at risk when a business fails to implement a successful and thorough offsite data backup plan. Some companies never recover from the blow.
After a major data loss, only 6% of those businesses will survive, studies show. A whopping 51% go out of business within two years, while a sober 40% are gone immediately.
Natural disasters happen, and they can take down your entire office.
40% of businesses never reopen after being destroyed by a natural disaster. — FEMA
Data loss has a big effect on that stat. Mother nature is unpredictable, at best. Natural disasters happen fairly often. Should a natural disaster destroy your entire office when you don’t have offsite backups, well…
That’s why it makes sense to for that offsite copy to be cloud-based, so that it stays up-to-date and can be restored easier in the event that disaster strikes.
Offsite data backup is more secure. Much more.
What’s the security like in your office? Maybe you work in a shared building, or maybe it’s just you and your co-workers. But even if you have a fairly extensive alarm system, it likely doesn’t compare to the military-grade security in a data center managed by a 3rd-party provider.
That security includes multiple layers of security to prevent data loss from all types of threats — from disasters to unauthorized access. Some of these facilities are even underground.
Not only that, but data centers have additional layers of protection that stop problems like malware and ransomware before they get into the network.
What’s more, with the right offsite backup solution, you should get multiple layers of backup redundancy, meaning even if your data could be compromised or lost in one data center, it would still be safe and sound at another site.
It’s the last stop to preventing complete business failure.
We provide Cloud Based Secure AES 256 Encryption backup solutions. Hosted on Amazon’s S3 AWS server, Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 region. To help better ensure data durability, Amazon S3 PUT and PUT Object copy operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once the objects are stored, Amazon S3 maintains their durability by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy.
Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If Amazon S3 detects data corruption, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.
Amazon S3’s standard storage is:
- Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement
- Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year
- Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities
Fore more information see https://rslcomputers.com/services/secure-backup/