As businesses become more computerised, the importance of having a data backup strategy grows. Your trade secrets and client database are at risk of being stolen and sold off if you don’t put the required safeguards in place, whether it’s due to ransomware, hackers, or data lost to criminals or natural catastrophes.
Businesses spend years gathering critical data, and the last thing you need is for your important digital assets to be lost to external or internal threats.
What Is Data Backup and How Does It Work?
To protect against data loss, you should make copies of your data from primary sources and store them in a secondary, and ideally a tertiary, location. Data is one of the most important resources and assets for any company, so having a data backup plan is critical. Data loss can cause major disruptions in your everyday operations as well as irreversible damage to your company’s brand.
It’s feasible to make backup copies of your data and restore them to their original place if needed. Backup data could mean the difference between your firm falling under or staying afloat in the event of an emergency or a malicious assault.
Five Options for Data Backup
Developers have created a slew of programmes to help you back up your data during the last few decades. To get the most out of your data backup strategy, you must choose the correct option for the size and purpose of your company. The most prevalent data backup solutions are shown below.
- Cloud Backup Alternatives
Cloud migration has been increasingly popular in recent years, with more businesses than ever turning to cloud providers for data storage. Cloud backups give you the assurance that all of your vital enterprise data is safely stored off-site. They provide additional protection and redundancy, ensuring that data is accessible in the event of a calamity.
- Data Backup Software
Although hardware appliances and external hard drives are typically easier to set up than software, the flexibility and additional features make it a must-have for many businesses’ data backup strategy. You may specify which data and systems you wish to back up, automate the backup process, and assign different categories of data to different devices.
- External Hard Disk Drives
Many firms’ backup processes rely heavily on high-capacity external hard drives, especially when paired with archiving software. Users may restore files from an external hard drive using this software, reducing RPO to only a few minutes.
A single hard disc won’t be adequate as RPO climbs in tandem with demand for your services and data volumes. Redundancy, a more complex data backup approach, is frequently used in this situation.
- Hardware Appliances
Backup appliances often have a large storage capacity and pre-installed backup software. The appliances are simply installed on the required systems, backup policies are defined, and data is then sent to the storage device. Hardware appliances should be deployed off-site or outside of the local network infrastructure if at all practicable.
- Media that can be removed
Using removable data storage media like USB sticks, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs is one of the most traditional and straightforward ways to do manual backups. While this may be sufficient for modest operations, higher volumes of data necessitate larger drives, complicating the recovery process. Furthermore, you must store data backups at a secondary place to avoid loss in the event of a disaster or on-site theft.
Regardless of the backup solution you use, the process should be automated so that it isn’t dependent on humans to remember to keep it up to date. Backups that are out of date negate the purpose and are almost useless.