Data is increasingly the lifeblood of businesses, and the amount each business generates increases almost every day. Keeping this data safe and secure is essential and part of doing this is making sure it gets backed up properly.
In the past, this meant tapes or external discs. This was a chore and often got neglected; however, with the introduction of the cloud, life has become much easier. Safe Data Storage offers cloud backup for business that enables you to save data from all your desktop PCs, servers, virtual machines and more to your own private cloud.
Backup plan
Which ever solution you use, it is important to plan how your backups are going to work for you. Using the cloud means you can have a continuous backup regime whereby a file is updated in the cloud as soon as it is modified locally; nonetheless, you still need to identify your most critical systems to ensure they are protected.
These systems will be increasingly running in the cloud, so you need a solution that can cope. Safe Data Storage offers modules for popular platforms, including VMWare and Office 365, so that you can save your data wherever it originates. It also lets you backup from multiple machines, and to manage all this information in a dedicated portal. If you are struggling with a slow internet connection, there is a seeding service that enables you to start your backup with a local save. This is then transferred to the cloud.
Of course, you also need a recovery plan – a backup is useless if you can’t easily retrieve information when it is needed. You therefore need to have procedures in place to restore data; whether this is an entire server following a disc failure, or a single accidentally deleted file.
Safe and secure
Any cloud backup for business needs to be secure. If you have personal data, whether relating to your customers or your staff, you have a duty of care to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Using a cloud provider for backup means you need to be confident that your data will be held safely.
In most cases, this means encryption, both at rest in the backup cloud and while in transmission. Safe Data Storage backup uses strong 448 Blowfish encryption. The data is sent over secure SSL connections, so it can’t be intercepted in transit.
You also need to think about how long you need to keep your data. There may be compliance requirements that compel you to keep data for a specific length of time, while other data may only be short-term. A good backup solution will enable you to determine how long the data is kept in each backup and to set different
