Cloud Back-up
The latest technology to emerge to backup data is Cloud backup. Typically your core data is taken off site using your internet connection. You configure the backup to move your critical data off site each night. You will normally pay per gigabyte of data that you store in the Cloud.
The price for these solutions varies greatly depending on the quality of the service that you pay for. The world of online backup can be a minefield to navigate. If you use an online backup service, you should be able to answer the following questions
- How long is the data held in the Cloud for (what if you need to recover data from 3 months ago)?
- How would you get your data back if the worst did happen?
- How would you access your core data if the worst did happen?
- Where is your data stored, ie. location, UK, US, Europe, Eastern Europe ?
- Is your data encrypted, if so how ?
- Have you tested your online backup service ?
- What guarantees does the data centre have in place to protect your data ?
- How long would it take you to recover from a disaster using your online backup solution?
Cloud Backups only provide part of the solution, in the event you were unfortunate enough to suffer a major outage or disaster, you will need to recover your data fast, so you need to have spare server capacity to restore the data to. If you store large volumes of data in the cloud it will take many hours if not multiple days to recover the data via the internet.
Very few providers will offer a service where by the data can be couriered back to you. Once requested, the data centre would start to copy your selected data on to an external hard drive and courier back to you, as you can imagine this whole process can take a couple of days to complete and during this process you cannot access your data and the business is down. Finally you will then need to build your replacement servers and recover the data adding to costly downtime.
Our Enterprise and Lite solutions provide instant access to server images in the Cloud.
