The internet is full of scare stories about the latest viruses and ransomware that will encrypt your files, or simply delete it without trace. These aren’t just scare stories, I have customers on my own little address list who have lost data to scammers.
You can’t underestimate the dangers of losing critical data. Yet the complexity of managing backups for yourself can be daunting. If you copy it to an external disk, how do you make sure the disk is safe? What if it’s swept off the shelf by a passing tea trolley? If it’s stolen, have you done enough to make the data unreadable to whoever gets their hands on it? Data protection is a hot topic these days, so handing over all your customers’ names and addresses could be as much of a disaster as losing your data altogether.
Many backup processes have fallen flat because no-one checked the logs to make sure they completed successfully, or because no-one ever thought to run a test and make sure the data was usable when it was copied back off the device.
The answer nowadays is refreshingly simple. With the increased availability of high speed internet connections (yes, I know, it’s never as quick as you’d like,but that’s beside the point), backing up to remote locations is now feasible for most businesses.
Your checkpoints:
Is my data going to be far enough away from the office if it burns down or there’s some natural disaster and an ark appears out of nowhere? Yes. Internet backups can have your data at the other end of the country.
Is my data going to be secure? Yes. Thanks to all the work that the banking sector has put into encryption, both when transmitting across the internet and when storing in a datacentre, these technologies are now available to the rest of us.
What if the datacentre suffers some catastrophic event – will my data disappear from their systems? No. Any datacentre provider adheres to strict regulations to make sure that there is at least one other copy of your data at least 25km away.
What about restoring all that information in the event that something goes horribly wrong? If you’re not going to another site with super quick internet connections, you can request that your data be recovered to a conventional disk drive and couriered direct to your new location.
Is it safe? Yes. You will set the encryption key and you can make it as complex as you like. The staff at the datacentre won’t know it and they won’t be storing it for any hackers to pick up. Of course, if you want to set your encryption key to “abc123” we can’t stop you!
How do I know the job is running regularly? You will control how often it runs, though we usually recommend overnight when your lines are quietest. If something stops a backup from running at its scheduled time you will be free to start it again manually. If the job repeatedly fails and you haven’t noticed, someone from the datacentre will make contact, just to make sure you’re aware.
Are you sure it will have time to backup all my data every night? Well, the first copy will take some time, but after that the software will run “block level copies”, transmitting only the chunks of a file which have changed, not the entire thing.
Isn’t this going to cost me an arm and a leg? No. Prices start from £1 per GB per month for this fully managed, security compliant service that could have you sleeping at night again.
Now isn’t that the cheapest IT technician you ever hired?
For more information, please get in touch using one of the channels on our contact page.