There are many facts and statistics which try to enforce the importance of your data, for example, 80% of companies who lose data will cease to trade within 2 years, or, 93% of companies who suffer total data loss will be out of business within 5 years. There are many more facts out there, most of them probably are not true, but we cannot get away from the fact that your data is the very foundation on which your business is built. Given the increase of severe events around the world, the threat of disaster is increasing to unprecedented levels.
Resulting from the above, protection of your business data or disaster recovery and business continuity has now become one of the important tasks. This is not just for the large corporate business world; it is for every company who holds data on a server or PC.
The emergence of new technologies such as online or offsite backup are now allowing smaller businesses to prepare for disasters with the same efficiently as large corporate companies. Many years ago, this backup solution was not a viable option, but since the dawn of low cost high performance internet connectivity and reduced hardware costs backup to a secure offsite location is now almost the most sensible option. It is estimated that use if remote backup will increase three fold in 2006.
There are many reasons why traditional backup solutions are becoming less suitable for today’s business environments, for example, disparate data spread across multiple sites makes local backups a major cost and resource issue, low volume of high importance data create a very high cost per MB backed up ratio and finally cost of staff who can administer such an infrastructure are expensive and should be utilized with more revenue generating tasks.
There are now many reasons why an online backup solution is a more cost effective and better fit solution than traditional tape solutions:-
Cost - the initial cost of a tape solution is in the region of £3000, plus you have ongoing media cost. Please note that you will have to replace your tape equipment every 3 years. If you are backing up 10GB of data this initial cost is very high compared to a monthly cost of £90.00 for offsite backup.
Human Intervention – Tape solutions will always require human intervention. Someone to make sure the tape is in the drive, someone to instigate the backup process, someone to verify the data has been copied and someone to remove the tapes offsite. Online backup solutions are a purely automated process, I call it set and forget. Once the software is configured your data will be automatically backed up to a secure offsite location, no intervention required.
Security – When you have backed up your data to tape it is not encrypted. That leaves you in a catch 22 scenario. You are either exposing your unsecured data to the outside world or you have to place your tapes in a fire and water proof safe in your office. The latter was a viable option until the Bunsfield Oil Refinery in the UK blew up and flattened buildings within a 3 mile radius. The unfortunate thing was there were many fire proof safes buried under many tones of rubble for 4 months.
Online backup will encrypt your data to the same levels used by your national bank, compress and then transmit to remote storage facilities. Your data will remain in the same encrypted state until you restore. Remember, the only person who can see the data is the holder of the encryption key.
Data Retention – You can decide how long you wish to keep old files or data for, or how many versions would like to keep. This functionality can only be achieved for tape solutions if you spend another £4,000 on archiving software.
Flexibility – If you outgrow your tape backup device, you have to do one of two things, 1) Replace your existing backup device, 2) re-assess your back and cut down the amount of data to be backed up. In my eyes, neither option is acceptable. Online backup offers the flexibility were should your data grow, all you need to do is upgrade your package. No need to through away perfectly good hardware.
