By Saaher Muzafer, Managing Director at Backup Everything
October 11, 2019

Cloud Backup Expert Tips: How Can You Use Offsite Backup as a Good Defense for Data Loss?

Offsite Data Backup:

Businesses understand the importance of keeping, maintaining, and safeguarding data by creating copies — also known as backups — to a remote offsite location. Offsite backup refers to the duplication of files to a separate geographical site, which can be another building or in the cloud over the Internet. Such data protection is helpful in situations, where data recovery becomes essential, and prevent any data loss which may propagates over a network.

Offsite backup solutions provide several benefits to businesses, such as increased reliability and efficiency and are based upon such capabilities and features, which most companies may be able to afford. Maintenance of infrastructure is also hassle-free, as the burden lies upon the shoulder of the service provider. Additionally, offsite backup solutions provide excellent accessibility of data through interconnected devices from with in various locations. The need for offsite data backup include the consolidation of backup operations, cost savings, and most importantly, disaster recovery.

Offsite data backup is usually performed by one of the following two ways:

  1. Physical Transfer: This involves copying files onto a removable hard drive and storing it in another location. Various sizes of data could be transported to the offsite location daily, or weekly or at any other intervals, based on the needs of the company.
  2. Automated Remote Cloud Backup: This is a 21st-century technology, which improved the manual transportation of files to an offsite location. All applications and data are backed up automatically as they are being processed, and stored on servers that are located offsite, in some cases in another country or continent. This type of backup is also known as remote backup, online backup or cloud backup.

Backup Operations Consolidation:

Organisations that are geographically dispersed may use automated offsite data backup solutions to backup their data to a central location, instead of making every branch maintain their backups on site. For this, backups will be created through WAN from one branch to another and transferred through the network to a central location. Enterprises will also be able to manage a higher degree of corporate control over its backup policies.

Cost Savings:

Depending upon the backup requirement of the enterprise and the situation within its production facilities, securing data to an offsite locations may be more cost-effective than that of creating data backup onsite. will be helpful in making efficient use of IT resources.

Disaster Recovery:

Recovery from disaster is critical. The main reason why one performs backups is to recover data in case of accidental deletion, corruption, natural disaster, and other factors that may cause data loss. If backups are properly done, recovery of data or applications become easier and effective whenever disaster strikes.

Advantages of Offsite Data Backup:

Most organisations choose Cloud backup solution for offsite backups. Organisations find cloud based automated backups to not only be easy, but also hassel-free, with just set it and forget it approach.

As the most chosen method of backing up, cloud backup provides the following advantages:

Reduced Workload: Up until cloud backup technology was introduced, data backup was performed by a designated IT person, who would copy or manually create a backup for data and files. This was time-consuming and required staff to spend additional working hours into their work schedule just to handle the backups. However, modern day cloud backups can be created with a couple of clicks, and can be scheduled to run the backup jobs when you are away, making the data recovery a breeze.

  • Reliable: Automation is the greatest advantage of remote based cloud data backup. Files and folders are updated regularly or time can be set for the task. Since, all backups are created over the cloud, it can be recovered easily and quickly. Additionally, servers through which data can be accessed can be set up in geographically dispersed locations, which ensure that backed up data is available and accessible even if a server crashes.
  • Secure: Cloud backup service providers place their servers in secure locations, which means that data is secure physically. Advanced encryption tools are orchestrated into the system, which will help in keeping data transfer secure in the cloud.
  • Easy Setup: Data backup companies are the specialists in the field, and knowledgeable staff run the system in the background, making sure that the backup jobs are done as scheduled. Backup solutions can be setup with a few clicks, assuring that data is backed up instantly.
  • Money Saved: For larger organisations, where there are various end-point devices, with a huge amount of data that needs to be backed up on a regular basis, storage media could get very expensive. Cloud storage solutions are billed on a monthly basis, and provide nearly unlimited storage space, but charge you on a pay-as-you-go basis plan. Companies with a huge amount of files and applications to be backed up, and those with mandatory data backup requirements will definitely find cloud backups to be a good option to save some money.

Exponential Data Growth and Storage Space:

As the need to store data increases, the challenge of storage space increases, which arises the need for optimising and managing data protection processes. Enterprises may come to realise that data they have may not just fit in one tape or hard drive. Additionally, employees may forget to change storage device every day. This is the time when a fully automated backup solution becomes essential for businesses. Most organisations consider offsite data backup to be the solution of the problem. A reliable and secure data protection solution is essential for a disaster recovery plan. No matter what the size of your storage that needs to be backed up is, offsite data backup solutions allow maintaining a current backup of data at a distant, safe and secure remote facility.

How Offsite Backup Works?

Special applications designed for backup solutions are installed at the servers. These applications compress and then encrypt the data before transmitting it through the Internet to the offsite data storage facility. All the data is backed up when servers are running. This way, for the organisation using this solution, the cost associated with servers or with application downtime is reduced. Moreover, special application agents provide the opportunity for real-time backup of SQL, Exchange as well as other databases. The moment data is transferred to the storage vault, it is safely and securely stored. Also, the data remain encrypted until it is restored on the computer of the client. Only those who have the password to that vault will be able to access the backed up data.

Conclusion:

Up till now, it has been very common that creating backups is an essential data security practise and many organisations are creating offsite backups, which are automated, and cloud based. Advanced technology and new paradigms, like object storage services and cloud-based backups, allow safe and secure data backups. With online data backup solution, both individuals and businesses are able to safely and securely create data backup at a remote facility almost instantly. Your data is very valuable. Never take a chance when the question is about security and privacy of data. Offsite backup solutions are effective in maintaining data security, as all valuable business data is saved at a remote facility, encrypted so that disaster recovery plans do not fail.

Backup Everything (BE) urges you look into cloud based data backup solutions for your business and extends its hand to bring you up to speed on the subject. Contact BE today.

About Backup Everything
London, UK based and industry leading company, Backup Everything (BE), provides automated cloud backup services for affordable and pre-determined prices. BE is not a location dependent service and its fee structure is the same no matter where in the world you are from. BE provides scalable space, meaning your backup space can be scaled up or down based on your needs. It also provides automated and scheduled backups, file versioning, with data encrypted during transfer and storage. BE does not charge data retrieval fees, it only charges for amount of data stored in its servers.

For a comprehensive and reliable service, it is prudent that the end user chooses services from an independent cloud backup company, like BE to backup their sensitive data. This way, the user will know their actual cost, where the data is being backed up to, and get the best bespoke service according to the Service Level Agreement (SLA) executed.

For more information, please visit www.BackupEverything.co.uk

About the Author: Jane Evans is a Sales Director at Backup Everything, a London, UK based, leading cloud backup company that offers bespoke services to global businesses and consumers.