Back up your data to keep your business healthy
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Being an IT professional is a bit like being a doctor; it carries the burden of expertise. People want to share their IT problems with you for a diagnosis and solution. With new technologies, platforms and services transforming business and society, often the best advice to give is to go back to basics.
Being an IT professional is a bit like being a doctor; it carries the burden of expertise. People want to share their IT problems with you for a diagnosis and solution. With new technologies, platforms and services transforming business and society, often the best advice to give is to go back to basics. Pay attention to essential systems such as backup and then, if something goes wrong, you have a line of first defence to fall back on.
Solid backup processes are the paratroopers of business defence. Best practice is a 3-2-1-0 approach to backup management: three copies of the data, on two differing media, one copy offsite and zero recorded failures.This ensures you will have a copy of your data no matter what happens. Multiple locations ensure that there is no single point of failure.
This best practice approach can be a big ask for most organisations. Even with deduplication technology, most find it too costly to retain more than a few months of backup data on disk. This has led to the rise in popularity of the public cloud as an off-site solution for backups, which ensures compliance with data retention policies and legislation.
However, is cloud the best solution? Data might be offsite but network latency issues can affect throughput. This can have a negative effect on restoration service levels. Switching between services or providers for a better solution is also problematic with entry/exit costs the main deterrent.
There is another option. Tape-based solutions have been around for a while and, in the avalanche of new applications, can be overlooked. The benefits of this solution speak for themselves: security, reliability, speed, cost effective, energy efficient and portable. Data is the lifeblood of modern business and this solid, foolproof solution guarantees quick, cost-effective access to business information no matter what the circumstance.
Solid backup processes are the paratroopers of business defence. Best practice is a 3-2-1-0 approach to backup management: three copies of the data, on two differing media, one copy offsite and zero recorded failures.This ensures you will have a copy of your data no matter what happens. Multiple locations ensure that there is no single point of failure.
This best practice approach can be a big ask for most organisations. Even with deduplication technology, most find it too costly to retain more than a few months of backup data on disk. This has led to the rise in popularity of the public cloud as an off-site solution for backups, which ensures compliance with data retention policies and legislation.
However, is cloud the best solution? Data might be offsite but network latency issues can affect throughput. This can have a negative effect on restoration service levels. Switching between services or providers for a better solution is also problematic with entry/exit costs the main deterrent.
There is another option. Tape-based solutions have been around for a while and, in the avalanche of new applications, can be overlooked. The benefits of this solution speak for themselves: security, reliability, speed, cost effective, energy efficient and portable. Data is the lifeblood of modern business and this solid, foolproof solution guarantees quick, cost-effective access to business information no matter what the circumstance.
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