5 Key Items to Consider When It Comes to Data Backup

A company is only as good as its data backup. In a perfect world, insurance isn’t necessary. But this is reality, and it’s never a matter of if things go wrong but when. Think of backing up your data as an insurance policy, ensuring you won’t lose valuable information when your primary systems go down.

Like any insurance coverage, there are many aspects to consider that directly affect the quality of your backups. Five key aspects of data backup every company should consider include redundancy, security, accessibility, reliability, and speed.

Data Backup Devices’ Inherent Qualities: Redundancy, Accessibility, and Speed

Like many things in life, two is better than one, and three is icing on the cake. The same applies to backing up your data.

Redundancy involves how many copies you have of your data. These copies can be complete or in parts and stored in a variety of ways. Basic types of storage include external hard drives, the Cloud, and NAS devices. No one is better than the other, but each has its advantages and plays a unique part in ensuring your company is following IT best practices.

External hard drives are perfect for backing up an individual employee’s data that must be immediately accessed in case things go wrong. A quick plug into a port will have the lost files back on a computer faster than any internet connection.

NAS devices – without going too deep into the technology – provide a massive leap from the capabilities hard drives supply, as they can be calibrated to capture an entire office’s data and infrastructure periodically. Performance lag is a minor downfall, but NAS servers ensure employees can get back to work quickly.

Cloud storage is the most foolproof way of ensuring your data's safety. If your building catches fire, your hard drives and servers will burn. However, your information stored in the Cloud will be untouched, as it is safe and sound offsite. Your company’s internet speeds serve as a bottleneck to how fast you can get back to work, but the trade-off is worth it during times of disaster.

But none of this means anything if your data isn’t secure or reliable.

Managed Service Providers – Filling the Security and Reliability Gap

Technology has limitations despite its 21st-century advances. This holds true with data backup options. But where your backup devices leave off, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can pick up the slack to protect your data. The final two aspects of ensuring your backups are nearly flawless are reliability and security.

Reliability is as basic as it sounds, a backup is worthless if it contains damaged or incomplete data. The best MSPs consider testing your backups to be at the top of the list.

Although your computers and servers are perfectly fine going down on their own, mechanical and software failures aren’t the only things out to sabotage your valuable information, which is where security comes into play. There are a variety of approaches MSPs use to protect your data against malicious hackers, from state-of-the-art software to 24/7 monitoring services.

Back up your Company’s Data

While actual insurance policies exist to protect companies against monetary losses from data failure, no amount of money can recover multiple years’ worth of work. Our team at Centre Technologies sees each aspect of data backup as essential to your company’s business plan. Don’t hesitate to call if you feel like any part of your data backup has holes. We guarantee something will go wrong at some point, but we also guarantee we will be there to put the pieces back together, completely and quickly.

Ready for real data insurance?