What Should You Look for in a Backup Solution?

As a business that values its data, you need to have some sort of backup solution put into place. Otherwise, a disaster could put your business’s future on the line. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to make such an important decision on the fly. The first step toward integrating a backup solution for your business is to do your research and understand what your options are.

What’s Your Current Backup Solution?
Even if you’ve never really considered your backup solution, you probably have some sort of measure taken to protect your data. One particular method is tape, which has been a commonly-used backup storage medium for quite some time. This consists of backups being taken manually, usually once a day. These backups can take a long time and are usually done after hours. Other businesses might keep their files backed up using some sort of external storage device, like USB drives or external hard disk drives. These might be useful for personal use, but they certainly aren’t compliant with data backup best practices for business.

The main question to ask here is whether or not your backup solution is up to the standards that you want for your business. Tape backup, while certainly better than no backup at all, can have its limitations. If the backups are stored on-site, a disaster that destroys your office could lead to permanent data loss. Also, a thief or rogue employee could easily make off with your tape storage should they desire to.yes

What Can You Do?
So, what can you do to resolve this problem? You can start by considering a new backup solution; one which backs up to the cloud multiple times a day with minimal downtime. This same backup solution should also store backups in a secure off-site location that’s easily accessible when the data recovery process begins. It might sound like a lot to ask for, but there’s a solution out there that handles all of this, plus some.

SMART Services’s Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution was created to address all of these common issues with tape backup solutions. With our BDR, your business can take advantage of multiple backups throughout the day; since only the data that’s been changed since the previous backup is being backed up, the time spent recovering this data is especially lessened. This allows for a more comprehensive backup compared to tape, which is more often than not from the previous day. Your data is backed up both off-site and in the cloud, meaning that you can use it to recover quickly and efficiently.

Furthermore, our BDR device is capable of replacing your server in a pinch. This is exceptionally useful if a disaster, like a hacking attack or hardware failure, were to strike. With the BDR acting as your server, you can minimize downtime and get back in the game while considering how to replace or repair your hardware.

For more information, give us a call at 586 258-0650 .