If you are responsible for IT infrastructure of Small to medium businesses or remote offices of larger enterprises, major challenge would be of meeting more stringent compliance requirements for protecting private information. If some disaster happens to your server, data must be backed up & could be recovered without any big loss. You probably choose backing up all your server data with a trusted server host. Most of the IT managers are increasingly looking to online backup and recovery services for server data protection. The dependency of a more distributed workforce on 24/7 access to business data stored on servers ensuring productivity requires a solution that meets Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives. The attractive price and predictability of a “SaaS” subscription model is more scalable & flexible over a more costly and cumbersome tape backup system allows IT to do more with less resources and ensuring business continuity.
Achieving critical business objectives for maximum productivity
Main objective of backup and recovery is to make sure that a business would be able to recovers from various server data failures such as individual file loss to an entire system in the optimum time frame as well as to recover to a version of the data that results in minimal loss of productivity. All the information and applications required to run a business are maintained on the variety of server platforms available with vendors in market. It could be physical system set aside within your IT Infrastructure to the dynamic virtual servers. Unlike usual desktops or laptops, servers run 24/7 to provide resources to the users connected to it.
These servers generally store a wide range of data types from different applications required for the business. Server data can be classified by its impact on business operations: mission critical (revenue producing or customer facing); business critical (supporting cross-organization functions); or operationally critical (important to individual departments).
This helps small to medium business or remote offices of large business, meet these two objectives with cost effective online server backup and recovery services supporting a wide variety of server platforms and data types help companies against traditional tape backup methods that require onsite IT professionals to run and maintain them.
Online services can mitigate much of the load of server data protection for backup and recovery requirements. These services transfer most critical data automatically offsite and offer better response time for recovery at less expense. Though it provides greater security for information through encryption in transit and in storage.
Online data protection is uniquely qualified
The previous section introduced a number of ways online data protection enables IT to focus on managing information and keeping workers productive rather than managing backup and recovery tasks in a diverse and distributed infrastructure.
• Backups are completely automated—the vendor, rather than IT, takes on most of the responsibility to ensure the success of backup, restores, and prevention of data loss
• Security is maximized—data is immediately stored offsite, with encryption ensuring data privacy in transmission and in storage
• Demonstrable, consistent best practices in data protection are in place globally and maintained by the vendor, according to the rules of the customer to accommodate variations in regional environments
• The cost and effort of maintaining, updating and extending the infrastructure for data protection is borne by the service provider rather than the customer, especially important in extending data protection systems to remote offices
An online data backup and recovery service can increase the coverage and frequency of automatic backups with minor impact on IT related capital expenditures and operating expenses. Broader, more frequent and more consistent protection reduces the risks to worker productivity, and risk of non-compliance repercussions.
The immediacy and comprehensive nature of online backup can also address Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) within a DR or business continuity plan. Though a majority of companies do establish their own RTO/RPO goals, few feel they consistently achieve their objectives.6 Online data protection moves data immediately offsite, and recovery from the vendor is dependent only upon the capability to receive the data in a “hot-standby” facility or other data center.
The following sections help companies identify and assign value to these cost categories. These costs can then be incorporated in a Return on Investment (ROI) analysis.
