Small Business Tips: Online Backup: Do I want this?

Posted on October 1st, 2008, 06:10 am
Filed Under (Biz Start Up) by George Bardissi

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Many people are starting to discover the phenomenon of online backup. What is it? How does it work? Is it secure? How much does it cost? Let’s dive into this from the top down.

Data storage, over the past few years, has seriously come down in cost. Many companies have since invested in creating data centers with massive storage capacity and with this capacity they offer companies around the world, that have a high speed internet connection,  the ability to use this storage space for secure off-site data backup. Is there an upside to this or does this make sense for my company? Many people forget that a company is only as good as its people and its information. This is why keeping data secure and backed up are two of the most crucial parts of information technology security as we know it today.

A traditional backup method, still in use, over the past several years, has been the tape backup solution. Companies would have a set of tapes and make sure at least one was kept off-site at someone’s house, out of the usual tape backup rotation. This is still a method in regular use today. However, there are many more methods in the mix today such as NAS (network attached storage), external hard drive backup and on-line backup just to mention a few. Keep in mind, there are many more types of back up methods, with others being created every day. Since online and off site backup has gained great popularity, it has become pretty inexpensive for what you get and gives your company an extra layer of data backup redundancy. Because there are an incredible number of data backup providers our limited column space won’t permit us to list them all and their cost factors. Instead, I would suggest that you Google data backup companies in your area.

Be assured you will get a very extensive list to choose from and compare prices on. Do I really need more than one data backup system? Well consider this, if for some reason your server were to crash or your data were to become corrupted causing your on-site data backup solution to fail, having a second and third backup method would be a way of making sure your data is protected. I caution against strictly using just one method of backup due to the fact that if that backup fails you are literally up the creek.

Also, other things to keep in mind are, if your internet connection fails then your on-line backup won’t work. Yes, on-line backup is secure because the data is encrypted before it is transferred over the internet and then kept secure in the data center where it is held. Retrieving data from the on-line storage software is very easy and does not require cumbersome software packages to get files back after data loss. If you use personal finance software such as Quicken, or Microsoft Money and use the online file backup for your data file they use this same technology as well. You may also see that manufactures are starting to offer one year free of charge on-line data backup with your PC purchase.

Of course, you would have to begin paying after the trial period. As time goes on and the cost of data storage continues to go down you will see off-site / on-line data backup and storage continue to surface in many areas and become very useful when, not if, something does go wrong. Remember, with information technology, it is a safe bet that something will, on occasion, go wrong. The question then becomes, “Will you be ready for it, when it happens?”

George Bardissi is the President and Owner of  Bardissi Enterprises, a Managed Information Technology solutions company, providing IT services to small and medium sized businesses.