Things to consider when backing up big data

Anyone running a business will know the significance of protecting the most important asset… data. A growing number of organisations are seeing that traditional offsite backup methods, often based on tape, no longer meet their needs and are looking at cloud based storage solutions as a way to handle the ever growing volumes of information and data. A cloud based solution will also make the data more readily available for disaster recovery thus supporting your Business Continuity Plan (BCP). We all wish to have the peace of mind that our business critical data is backed up offsite and protected from accidental deletion, corruption or system loss. So…… we know that we need to backup our data and ideally offsite but what are the questions we need to be asking about the right choice of backup system and how do we know which system is right for us?

Here are a few questions that you may wish to consider when looking at a back-up and recovery plan for your business:

Where will my Data be held physically? Backing up to the cloud can be a scary prospect as you don’t know where your data is actually physically being stored. For legal reasons some data will need to be stored in a UK Data Centre.
How secure will my data be? It is essential to ensure that any backup provider is ISO27001 certified meaning that they will have processes in place for Information security Management systems. This will give you the peace of mind that your data is in safe hands.
Will I be able to manage my own backups? It is important that any organisation offering backup solutions will give you the tools by which you will be able to manage the frequency and type of backups that you need. Sometimes you may only need to perform incremental or differential backups meaning that only the files that have changed since the last full backup will be updated.
How scalable will my backup repository be? You may only need to back up a small amount today, perhaps a few hundred GigaBytes (GB’s), however, data is growing massively and it could well be several TeraBytes (TB’s) before long so choose a service provider that is scalable and will be able to match your storage needs as you grow.
What is the Disaster Recovery process? In the event of the your worst possible nightmare where you lose all your data it is important to have a DR plan in place. In order to create this plan it is necessary to ascertain what the RTO ( Recovery Time Objective) which is the amount of time it will take to recover your data after it has been lost and the RPO ( Recovery Point Objective) which is the frequency of backups or in real terms the point when the last backup was taken. These are two specific parameters expressed as hours or days that a business can be without service and not incur significant losses.
How long will it take to replicate my data in my new backup repository (facility), especially if I have TB’s of data? If you have a lot of data to upload and a poor Internet speed it may be an idea to pick a local Data Centre where you will be able to physically visit and perform an initial seed upload in the data centre. If you have a lot of data e.g. tens of TeraBytes (tens of thousands of GigaBytes) the you need some specialist advise and help. For example, you need a backup partner who can come to site and replicate your data onto a portable storage device (initial seed upload) and bring this to the data centre for replication.
Remember, it’s not about backup it’s about RECOVERY! Imagine the worst possible scenario………….. A fire? a flood?……………… A catastrophic incident and you lose your whole IT infrastructure and worse still your building. What would you do and where would you go? If you have your data backed up with Datanet we can help you with your recovery plan. You can come and use our offices whilst you are getting back on your feet – Datanet can provide you with a desk, phone line and Internet connection. Our helpful technical team can spin up as many virtual servers as you need on which you can restore your critical data and we will work with you to ensure that you have your IT infrastructure up and running in the shortest time possible.