Why offsite data backup is essential for your business
As with most businesses today, yours probably keeps commercially sensitive, critical information stored locally on workstations or a server. But what would you do if you were to lose this data?…
Offsite data backup is the process of using a remote – often cloud-based – storage system to ensure that you never lose your information. There can be many reasons why your business would be at risk from data loss. You could suffer a power failure, natural disaster, office flood, or even file loss due to human error. Having your data backed up offsite, however, will ensure you’re always one step ahead.
Why should I consider offsite data backup?
Almost every business using computers could be under threat of data loss. From office fires to burglary, flood or even natural disasters, if you don’t store backup data offsite, you are at risk of losing vital information. Without this data, your business could grind to a halt, with downtime potentially resulting in lost revenue, fines, customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage.
There are a number of reasons why you should consider offsite data backup:
- Protect against the loss of data following a security breach – Offsite data backup will allow you to keep your information safe and sound following a security breach, restore it and helping to ensure that you don’t have to pay following a ransomware attack.
- Enjoy unlimited storage space – Most offsite cloud storage solutions will give you unlimited space to store your data, or a plan that will allow you to increase the space as your business grows.
- Free up more onsite storage – If you’re using hard drives onsite to save data, they may become full very quickly. Furthermore, they’re also vulnerable to failure with data potentially at risk as a result. By saving all of your data within an offsite data backup, you should be able to free up a substantial amount of space onsite.
- Information will save automatically – There’s no need to remember to constantly back up your data; to remove and replace cumbersome tapes or hard drives. With an offsite data backup, your files will be automatically backed up, either to the cloud or to a dedicated off-site data centre.
- It gives you peace of mind – You’ll never need to worry about losing your data again. Offsite data backup ensures that your information is stored in one extra place and cannot be destroyed like physical storage devices.
Offsite data backup has now become the most cost-effective and convenient service for data storage.
What services are available?
With the combination of an increase in data ‘production’ and the rise of cloud-based software, it has never been a better time to make the most of offsite data backup. However, with a few options to choose from, it’s important that you know all of the facts before you proceed.
There are a number of companies that offer data protection in line with today’s tough demands. Acronis Backup is affordable, can scale to meet your needs, protects workloads and keeps your business running in the face of adversity.
Alternatively, you could go with a file hosting service like Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint which allows businesses to store unlimited amounts of data on the cloud.
Even though these cloud-based storage services solve many of the problems that previous offsite data backups caused, there are still a few risks that you should take into account.
Even with remote backup data storage, the location is still at risk of natural disasters like flooding and earthquakes. However, because these companies specialise in offsite data backup, they are far better equipped to manage technology updates and innovations that will continue to protect your data. Reputable providers will take the necessary steps to future proof themselves against disasters. Many companies will install flood defences, fire resistant building materials and power cut plans.
That’s why it’s important to store your data with a large and experienced provider, rather than managing your own offsite data storage. Almost all reputable data storage services have redundancy installed into their infrastructure to protect against data loss or outages, which ensures your data will always be safe and available. Their interfaces are user-friendly, which eliminates the need to pay for staff training and they will take care of the logistics and planning that goes into managing a data vault.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for an offsite data backup service today and never worry about losing your data again.
