Posts Tagged ‘online backup’

Tape backup is notorious for its inadequacy. It is unreliable, as its properties are dependable on human errors and technologically failures. Tapes are prone to mechanical, thermal and other kind of physical intervention, which can reduce their quality. The data recovery from tapes is only 60% true, as most information is lost due to the technical disadvantages. Tape backups can have slower recovery time than any other off-site backup driver. The potential threats that tapes can bring to the extraction of data is stronger than in any types of information containers. So, the next logical question to be posed here is why should rational businessmen or data admins depend on the inadequate tape systems? Offsite backup is much more reliable, faster and efficient, in comparison to the slow and old-fashioned tape backup.

Tapes have a technical annual failure in score of 1 to 12 percent. Due to this technical drawback, you should provide more tapes for containing information, as you can never be sure if they would work or would crack down. The multiple tapes that you will need for storing all the information will gradually ruin your budget, that’s why tape backup is often more expensive than offside backup, but it resumes its inadequate and slow working features nevertheless. The number of tapes that fail from either technical or administrative mistakes is estimated around 60 %. Just imagine the total budget for restoring the lost information: it will be enough to make your bankrupt!

But even more astonishingly, tape backups are still used today in many organizations, which are storing all their valuable files on mere tapes. The span that tapes are reliable is about a year: they tend to gradually decay and lose the stored information. Literally every user has experienced a tape deterioration when storing some files. Many end users are seriously disappointed when this happens to them , and start searching for other ways to protect their data. Some companies acquire daily backup regime, which is time and money consuming. Although it serves the requirements put by tape backups, it is highly stressing and can impede the daily regime of the enterprise. Tape backups are likely to have drawbacks, the same as disk . Using both methods is probably the best way to have your data protected.
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The concept of offsite data backup is not new; some time ago it was only available to corporate institutions that had multiple locations, high connectivity speeds and very high budgets. Today the cost of hardware and high speed connectivity has greatly reduced, as a result the number of companies offering backup to a remote location has greatly increased. For purposes of conversation, we can call it jumping on the band wagon.

You may think the increased competition is good for the consumer, to an extent, I agree, but not at the cost of cutting corners and jeopardising the security of your data. We all know and agree a company’s data is its most important asset, and to lose or give access to your competition such an asset is never an option. So please be careful where you store your data.

The general idea of offsite backup is a good one, after all it has a very low proportionate implementation cost and as the correct system should be completely automated the cost of ownership is also very low as well. Unlike tape backup it is also very scalable, you can start small and grow into larger solutions as and when you require with zero disruption but you have to be with the right offsite backup company in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

If your business works on critical databases that are too important to lose, offsite backup technology can save it safely on remote places. This means complete safety of your data from local calamities, fires, and other natural factors that can corrupt or destroy your valuable database.

Go For Professional Offsite Backup

The business world runs on information and data – customer profiles, reports, charts, analyses, accounting reports, or documents and files that store text, audio, and video in various formats. This valuable data needs to be backed up in case there is a local eventuality such as power breakdowns, fires, and system failures that corrupt and destroy database files.

An offsite backup service works as follows. Client’s data is first encrypted, compressed, and then transmitted to an offsite high-security data center. The storage is done using mirrored RAID servers. Data retrieval can be done during any emergency using either Internet or other data restore lines. Added Features of Offsite Backup

An offsite backup service run professionally can include the following services – client account management, support over telephone, linked accounts billing, large storage capacities running into terabytes, central management for multiple locations, and backing up of both email and normal databases. What can Offsite Backup deliver to you?
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Companies must account and deal for new legislation governing how information is stored on IT systems.

The EU is shortly to adopt many of the recommendations on corporate governance set out by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK firms are to be expected to deal with and manage explicit guidelines on how to store email and other documents on their IT systems. IT managers should consider the necessary procedures and technologies needed for compliance now, in order ensure technology is able to deal with the new legislation.

Regulations regarding data storage at the moment are fairly lax, but there will be a huge increase in the amount of data than must be held over the next 18 months to two years.

Email archiving, the increased use of expencive write-once read-many media, information lifecycle management and content-aware storage as a few of the technologies which firms should consider for the future, though in some cases companies will simply need to improve the way they manage existing systems.

It is anticipated that new legislations will demand that an organizations’ archiving solutions must guarantee that the information they hold has not been changed, and keep it for a specific period of time before automatically deleting it.

A survey of 493 companies in the UK has shown that compliance with regulations has a high or fairly significant impact on the data storage strategies of 87% of the organisations surveyed. Back-up and recovery was also very important to the data protection strategy of 93% of organisations.
78% of organisations future storage strategy is set to include Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape technology. This may be due to the highly affordable and flexible nature of this new technology. For example, recent deployments of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) solutions by various companies have, on average, reduced the backup window by more than 70%, from fifteen hours to less than four, yielding significant time and cost savings in tape management.

Interestingly, product features were far more important than the brand of the product, with 82% of organisations making a decision based on product features. When it came to the decision of choosing a specialist storage supplier or a general IT provider for storage solutions there was a very slight preference for specialised storage suppliers (51%) over general IT providers (49%).
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