3 Ways Your Business Can (and Should) Back Up Data
As technology evolves, producing more data as a result, the backup systems we use to protect this data are also evolving. For businesses there are now several options to choose from when it comes to backing up their data. Below are three distinct ways a business can back up data. Remember, it’s not a question of if you should back up but rather of how. Here is a quick “back up 101” review:
1. On-Premise Backup
The process of storing data locally, whether on hard drives, disks or servers.On-premise solutions are popular and widely known as being “safe”. They are quick, and provide low latency as they are local and backed by networking communications, which are suitable for a variety of different workloads, including those that require high performance.
2. Cloud Backup
A service that replicates the data on a local hard drive or local file system and stores that duplicate data in the cloud. It is a specialized type of offsite data backup, in that the backup is conducted over a conventional Internet connection, and the duplicate data is generally accessible from any web browser.
Like any backup, cloud backup systems are designed for the explicit purpose of protecting against data loss and minimizing the time it takes to restore lost data. Cloud backup is basically stuff on your hard drive that you backed up on the web.
3. Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
This type of backup replicates data stored in one cloud system and stores that duplicate data in another cloud system. Cloud-to-cloud backup is different from cloud backup in that it does not involve any data stored on a local hard drive.
The primary systems protected by cloud-to-cloud backups are web-based applications — from personal apps like Gmail to enterprise-grade SaaS applications like Salesforce — wherein the user often has limited or highly regulated access to their data. Cloud-to-cloud backup systems extract data from these web apps and place them in entirely separate cloud storage systems, ensuring that a software glitch or security breach in the primary system does not irrevocably destroy user data.
Cloud-to-cloud backup systems are also optimized to restore data from backup into the primary web application to minimize downtime and lost productivity.
So, there you have it! No matter the scale of your company, there’s a backup solution that’s perfect for you.
