In an era where data has immense value and the amount businesses collect is growing exponentially, the question of how you back up your data is an important one to ask. This goes beyond looking at how and where you store your backups, and asking whether your backup strategy meets your needs in terms of backup frequency, storage space, retention policies, security and compliance, data integrity, ease of use, restoration speed and cost. With so many requirements to consider, many older backup methods fail to meet today’s needs. Here, we look at how cloud-based backup solutions can futureproof your data.
Meeting frequency requirements
While every business needs to back up its data, some businesses will need to back theirs up more frequently than others. If you are constantly adding new data or data is frequently updated or altered, then you may need to make backups very frequently or in some cases, continually, to ensure that no data is lost. For example, busy online stores that can make sales around the clock and where customers can change their personal details at any time need to ensure that their backups are as up to date as possible. If not, and a disaster ensues, those most recent sales and changes will be lost if an out-of-date backup is used for recovery.
The latest cloud-based backup solutions can be configured to create backups autonomously, at the frequencies businesses require and without the need for manual input. Simply set the frequency levels in the dashboard and the system takes care of the rest.
Storage and retention
Scalability is one of the most beneficial features of the cloud and this is available with cloud-based backup solutions. The advantage here is that as the amount of data being collected increases and backup sizes grow, businesses can increase storage to ensure that there is sufficient space to hold all their backups. This prevents situations arising where new backups cannot be made because existing storage is at capacity.
In terms of retention, scalable storage enables data to be kept for longer if required, however, the latest backup solutions enable companies to create automated retention policies which will systematically delete older backups. Businesses can set a retention time limit for their backups and after this has been reached deletion will take place. This then frees up space for new backups and helps to keep costs down.
Struggling to manage data? Read: 7 Steps to Better Data Management
Security and compliance
Backups naturally include copies of all a company’s important data, including the personal data of customers and employees, as well as financial information and critical business intelligence. Much of this data would need protection under regulations such as GDPR and if it fell into the wrong hands, the implications could be disastrous and lead to serious financial penalties. For this reason, backups need to be as robustly protected as data stored on a company’s main systems.
While older backup solutions, such as tapes, can be stored offline, modern cloud-based backup solutions need to be online to enable continuous backups to take place. However, they come with a variety of security measures to ensure they are protected. As you would expect, they are stored remotely from a company’s systems, so that if the system is compromised, the backups remain available. Further than that, however, they are heavily encrypted, both in transit and at rest, to ensure that the data cannot be used or tampered with even if unauthorised access is gained. And to protect against unauthorised access, businesses can put access control measures in place.
For more information, read: Data Governance: Key Strategies for Business
Data integrity
For businesses that suffer a data loss, one of the biggest worries is that their backup will be corrupted, and no recovery can take place. The consequences of this happening are potentially catastrophic. One of the issues with older backup methods, like tapes, is that there is no way of guaranteeing a backup’s integrity. You can only know whether it works when it is needed – at which point it is too late to do anything if it doesn’t.
Cloud-based backup solutions do away with this uncertainty. They automatically check backups for integrity as soon as they are completed. What’s more, if there is an issue, companies are immediately alerted so that the issue can be resolved and a new backup made straight away. The outcome is that businesses have the reassurance that if they ever need a cloud-based backup, it will work.
Ease of use
Traditionally, making backups has been a labour-intensive and time-consuming process for IT teams. This is perhaps one of the reasons why too many companies do not make backups as frequently as their business needs demand. Cloud-based backups make the process much easier and require far less input from employees, freeing them to work on more important tasks. Essentially, it is a ‘set and forget’ solution.
As we have already mentioned, automation plays an important role here. The settings controlling backup frequencies and retention lengths can quickly be accessed in the solution’s dashboard and once these have been configured, the system operates all by itself. Similarly, if storage capacity is getting full, businesses are automatically alerted so that they can add more. Being in the cloud, this can be done in a few clicks – there’s no need or hurry to purchase more tapes or a bigger storage drive.
Recovery
The important reason why backups are critical is that they enable companies to recover from disaster, whether that’s due to human error, cybercrime or infrastructure failure. Disaster recovery plans, however, have two critical objectives – recovery point and recovery time. The recovery point objective aims to restore the system to as near as possible to the point at which the disaster took place, while the recovery time objective seeks to restore the data as soon as possible to reduce the impact of downtime.
of downtime.
Cloud-based backup solutions futureproof data by helping both of these objectives to be met. The ability to make frequent or continuous backups is invaluable in achieving the recovery point objective while having backups stored in the cloud speeds up restoration to help meet the recovery time objective. With the latter, 100% cloud uptimes mean availability is guaranteed and fast internet speeds ensure that your integrity-checked backups can be transferred quickly. Additionally, cloud providers will also offer 24/7 technical support with their backup solutions, ensuring that any recovery issues are swiftly dealt with.
For more information, read: Is Your Small Business Prepared for Disaster Recovery?
Conclusion
For businesses that are becoming increasingly reliant on data, modern cloud-based backups are the ideal solution for futureproofing that data against data loss. Offering a wide range of features, they provide frequency and retention automation, scalable storage, enhanced security and compliance, assured data integrity, ease of use and the ability to meet recovery objectives.
Looking to futureproof your data? Check out our cloud-based Remote Backups page to find out how our advanced solutions keep your critical data secure.
