Gabriele Sposato, chief marketing officer at Aruba, discusses which measures organisations should take to ensure their data is backed up safely.
Data is crucial to an enterprise. Losing data through human error or hardware failure can threaten an enterprise’s existence, with the potential to cause reputational damage.
Although faulty hardware or lost devices can always be replaced, the value that data represents, including confidential work (legal, medical, educational, etc.), or crucial CCTV footage, is often irreplaceable. In our increasingly digitised world, understanding the best practices and measures that businesses can undertake to look after their data is more important than ever.
Of all the options available, the key to data security is to backup regularly.
The power of cloud
Carrying out consistent and efficient data backups, either on a physical tape copy stored in a remote location or on a local network service such as a private FTP minimises the chance of losing data in a force majeure situation. Although a network backup serves to replicate and restore networked services when a primary network is unavailable, such as in the case of a natural disaster, its implementation should also be seen as a way to protect information. This is a high priority measure for those enterprises dealing in critical data, such as government institutions, where security is of paramount importance.
It’s also equally important to not treat the backing-up of data as something that only needs to be acted on in the case of when it gets lost. In the early days, people used to backup their data because they couldn’t rely on their hardware or software. Fast-forward to 2020 and we now have much less to worry about on the reliability front, with cloud technology changing the game for how data is stored.
Deploying a cloud backup strategy enables employees and other business stakeholders to easily run apps and access data files through an online backup service that stores data on physical servers within a data center. This is a popular option for enterprises to consider, as online backup via cloud encrypts and synchronises files in real-time on the servers of the data center hosting the service. This ensures that there’s always a copy of that data in the cloud – easily accessible and safe.
Another benefit to enterprises deploying a cloud backup solution is that the data hosted on these machines is protected by disaster recovery systems capable of coping with any type of destructive event. This is even more important in this era of GDPR, where regulatory compliance and increasing attention to privacy and data protection makes it crucial to be able to count on a data storage system that is flexible and integrated into existing systems.
The scalability of the cloud also offers quick solutions to transfer and save data on a remote server. Benefits include ease of browsing files and the ability to modify them from anywhere in the world, without limitation of compatibility with software or operating systems. There are also software programs that can perform backups regularly, automatically on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, thus reducing user intervention to a minimum and minimising bandwidth usage so as not to interfere with other daily operations.
Prioritise your backup strategy
Although businesses have many things to think about at the moment, the preservation of their data should always be front of mind. The good news is that automating backups into the cloud or to onsite storage is simple to set up and inexpensive. It’s important that enterprises have a good grasp of how to do this, as well as being aware of the latest technologies out there.
