We won’t state the obvious, but we all know the importance of backup. If any company does not meticulously back up its data, it is making a tremendous mistake. Having your data compromised, lost, or corrupted will create chaos in your environment and could cost your business thousands of dollars. What business owners don’t realize is that having their employee sit down while their IT is retrieving their data or server also costs money.
Think about it, if you pay your employee $10 an hour and they work 8 hours a day, you have to pay them $80 a day, correct? (Of course we are not considering taxes, insurance, etc.). If your server is down or data is corrupted and it takes 4 hours to recover, your employee does not cost you $10 per hour. Your employee costs you $20 an hour because he only worked 4 hours out of 8. Multiply this by the number of employees you have and you will have an idea of the damage.
Corrupted data or a server crash affects your sales, production, and if recovery takes too long, you could go out of business. According to business reports, 70% of small businesses that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. The cost of hardware has dropped dramatically, and today anyone can afford a decent backup solution. We’ll cover two solutions in this article and help you see which is better for your business. The first is simply a local to online cloud backup solution. The second is an online cloud backup disaster recovery solution.
If your business doesn’t have critical applications, and if your business won’t be affected if your server is down, you may want to consider an on-premises-to-online cloud backup solution. A typical company without a critical application is one that only has a file server. It can be argued that even if a file server is down for a couple of hours it could affect business, we agree with you. But let’s say this is a simple file server, no active directory, no access right, no critical applications and being idle for a couple of hours is acceptable. For such a company, a local online cloud backup should suffice. Because? A local to online cloud backup will do the following:
- Back up your raw data to external hardware (local but off the server)
- Send another copy of the raw data to the online cloud backup.
So if the server fails, data is corrupted or lost, you can quickly recover it from your local hardware. If something were to happen to your entire office, such as a fire, water damage, or any direct or indirect disaster, you can recover your data from online cloud backup, from anywhere. And having this data accessible to you from anywhere at any time could save your business. Consider the following when looking for an online backup solution:
- Good security that meets your business requirements and compliance, such as encryption, PCI, SAS 70 or HIPAA, etc.
- Make sure the company you select has a couple of data centers around the country, so if one is down, you can still access your data from the others.
- Make sure the upload speed is fast. If your data takes too long to upload, it could take weeks for the first backup to take place.
- Make sure there is no file size limitation. If one of your files is too large, it may not upload.
If your business currently has critical applications and your servers cannot be down, consider a backup disaster recovery solution. One of the biggest challenges companies face is how to maximize business continuity and avoid business interruption following a server failure or data loss.
Some BDR (Backup Disaster Recovery) solutions provide fast and reliable data backup, protection, disaster recovery, and system migration so that servers are online or data is recovered as quickly as possible after a disaster. How does it work? A BDR solution will take an image of your entire server and store it on external hardware. Another copy of the image will be sent to the online cloud backup.
So what is the difference between this solution and the first one we described before?
If the server goes down due to physical or software reasons (or disaster), you can use the backup file and mount it as a virtual machine. That means you won’t have to reinstall the operating system, your applications, configure the applications and the server, etc. This can potentially save you days of work and thousands of dollars. We mean it, days of work and thousands of dollars. On top of that, if your entire site goes down, depending on the online cloud backup provider, they can mount his server virtually on your cloud servers and provide you a VPN access. So if your environment fails, you now have your exact server, from the last backup set, running in the cloud. You do not need to have any additional hardware or software for this. These solutions are becoming more common. We call them hybrid BDR solutions because they don’t force a customer to buy local hardware and lock it into a large up-front setup fee. You only pay for online virtual server setup if your entire site goes down. No additional monthly hardware fee or additional cost, making these solutions absolutely affordable. SMBs and MMBs can now have the same type of backup solutions that businesses use.
Consider the following when looking for a BDR solution.
- The BDR backup file must be the full image of your server.
- The BDR solution should seamlessly perform incremental backups every 15 minutes if needed.
- Incremental backups should be fast, automatic, and continuously in the background.
- The solution must have the ability to restore the backup to a virtual environment such as Oracle Virtual Box, VMware, or Microsoft HyperV. (The entire system will be restored to a virtual machine.)
- The BDR solution should allow the recovery of files and folders.
- It should allow full recovery. In case you want to recover the server on different hardware.
- Online backup must have the ability to upload local image files securely to the cloud.
So overall, when considering a backup solution, you’ll need to understand your business needs and requirements, and what the business can tolerate in the event of an outage. With this information, you should be able to select a local or online cloud backup or BDR solution. Both solutions are very cheap and every business should take advantage of them. You can purchase a monthly license for the BDR solution and pay as little as 50 cents per gig for cloud space. Don’t risk losing your business data for just a few dollars a month.
