Your data is the most important part of your IT system and should be an essential part of any business continuity plan. In fact some surveys suggest that 70% of small businesses fail following a major data loss and their business insurance policies rarely cover all direct and indirect costs.
Most small-to-medium sized companies only use a single-tier, local backup solution, and another 15 to 20% do no backup at all. Local backup is great first line of data defence, but it’s not enough to ensure your data is protected against loss, theft or compromise. Best practices dictate not only having a strong local backup process but also adding a second tier of protection with remote or online data backup.
- Complete Off Site Solutions – Your data is held completely off-site and many online backup solutions also hold your data within multiple data centres for extra redundancy.
- Automatic Backups – One of the problems with traditional backup methods is that they require user intervention, meaning that you have to remember to physically change a tape or other media and keep that media safe. Most online data backup services work automatically and in the background to sync your data.
- Data Recovery – If you do suffer data loss your data can be restored from the cloud to any site or device. This is crucial for business continuity, as if you office is out of action you can easily get backup and running in a temporary location.
- Secure – Your data is automatically encrypted before it is sent over the secure Internet connection. The data remains stored encrypted.
- Scalable – Online backup systems can be increased or reduced depending on your requirements, you do not have to worry if the backup tape is big enough to back up all your data.