How Secure Are Online Backup Services?

Trusting important corporate or personal data to an online backup provider can be unsettling.

Typically, secure data backups have resided on local tapes, CD’s or floppies that stayed under one’s physical control. With online backup, the data is sitting in someone else’s server.

To alleviate the security concern, most online backup providers use military grade encryption to make sure that only you have access to your data.

In some cases, users may decide not to encrypt the data, in order to speed up data transfer between the user’s computer and the backup server. In this case, one has to make sure that the backup provider is trustworthy and have internal policies that guarantee privacy and security for client’s data.