In the new age, we all are heavily dependant on computers and the digital way of living. We communicate through emails, we do purchases online and even most of our savings are nothing but some stored digits in some bank’s computer!
Almost all businesses depend on computers in one way or the other. As we depend more and more on digitally stored data, the importance of meticulous backup increases.
Have you imagined a situation where computer crashes and you lose all your emails- your address book and all your correspondence ?
What happens if your web server loses all its information? how much time will you take to restore it?
Catastrophes can come in any form: it could be technical: high voltage pulse that burns your hard drive, a virus attack, a hardware failure; or non technical: robbery, flood or any other mishap.
As the business depends more and more on the information stored on the hard disk, it becomes essential that you have a meticulous backup process to ensure business continuity.
Why is Remote Backup important?
Remote backup is important because a physical mishap *can* happen at any place. Unfortunate events are always unexpected. But it is up to you to ensure that your business survives. Would your business survive fire? What about robbery?
Remote backup ensures that your important business data still ‘lives’ safely at some place even after a physical mishap. You can recover the business contacts, the transactions , and all other data you chose to backup.
Aspects to consider for your backup
Time to recover
How much time will it take to recover if a mishap occurs at a very unexpected point of time?
Time to recover is an important parameter because that directly affects the business. It has direct impact on the number of lost customers, customer loyalty and the customer support.
Security
It is important to keep the backed up data safe from tampering or snooping
Local and Remote Backup
Local backup will save you from system crash , virus attack or a hard drive failure. But a local backup may not help you in case of a robbery, fire, flood, terrorist attack or any other physical mishap.
In order to ensure the business continuity, you need to have both a local and remote backup strategy.
The local backup ensures that the Time to recover is minimal whenever possible. Depending on only one of these (Local or Remote ) can not be recommended. If you have only local backup, your business is not fully protected. If you have only remote backup, the time to recover can be painfully long even for a hard disk crash event.
How is Remote Backup Done?
The important business data is compressed, encrypted and is sent to one or more physically distant locations. The data is safely stored in those locations. Remote backup is done in pre-determined intervals.
Sending to the distant location is the bottleneck in the whole process. The easiest way would be to upload the data through an internet connection. The other alternative is to write the backup data to tape or DVD and then send them physically to the remote location.
When done regularly, remote backup saves your data and importantly, your business from any unfortunate event at the place of business.
