How To Se­cure Your Back­ups With­out Break­ing The Bank

Data se­cu­rity is a key con­cern for the vast ma­jor­ity of mod­ern com­pa­nies. Hav­ing your cus­tomer or fi­nan­cial data com­pro­mised can be more than an in­con­ve­nience, with many busi­nesses un­able to func­tion with­out ac­cess to mis­­­sion-crit­i­­cal records. Com­bine this with the fines and bad pub­lic­ity that may come from breach­ing data pro­tec­tion laws and you can see why many or­gan­i­sa­tions in­vest heav­ily in their backup systems.

How­ever, you don’t need to be part of a multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion to keep your data se­cure. By care­fully analysing your needs and ex­am­in­ing the many backup op­tions on the mar­ket to­day, it’s en­tirely pos­si­ble to get en­ter­prise-grade data se­cu­rity for a small busi­ness friendly price tag.

Go Old School With Tape

Mag­netic tape is one of the old­est tech­nolo­gies in com­put­ing, hav­ing been around since velour flares and The Doors were in fash­ion. Even mod­ern tape sys­tems still use fun­da­men­tally the same tech­nol­ogy as a con­ven­tional VCR player, with data read from a car­tridge by a spe­cialised tape drive.

In short, you could be for­given for think­ing that an in­vest­ment in tape would be a waste of time, but you’d be wrong. Tape stan­dards like Lin­ear Tape Open (LTO) are thriv­ing be­cause they of­fer huge stor­age ca­pac­i­ties for a frac­tion of the price you would pay to store the same amount on a hard drive. Read and write ac­cess can be slow from tape how­ever, mak­ing it bet­ter suited to archiv­ing ap­pli­ca­tions that need a lot of cost-ef­fec­­tive stor­age space but don’t re­quire files to be ac­cessed too often.

Get Your Data On­line With Cloud

Cloud stor­age in­volves up­load­ing your data to a ded­i­cated on­line stor­age provider, rather than keep­ing every­thing backed up on your premises. The cloud stor­age in­dus­try has grown enor­mously over the last few years, with a huge range of dif­fer­ent pay­ment plans and se­cu­rity lev­els avail­able to customers.

The main ad­van­tage of cloud stor­age is its ac­ces­si­bil­ity as be­cause your files are on­line, you can ac­cess them from al­most any in­­ter­net-con­nected de­vice. Cloud also means that you don’t need to spend huge amounts of money on stor­age hard­ware and its as­so­ci­ated man­age­ment and main­te­nance costs. How­ever, some cloud providers can be­come a tar­get for hack­ers, so try to find one that of­fers high-level en­cryp­tion ser­vices for your data and pass­words to en­sure that your work stays safe.

Get Ul­ti­mate On­site Pro­tec­tion With RAID

Re­dun­dant Ar­ray of In­de­pen­dent Disks (RAID) of­fers just about the strongest pro­tec­tion you can get for your data if you de­cide to store on­site. A hard­ware RAID de­vice is ef­fec­tively sev­eral hard dri­ves in­side a cas­ing, con­nected to a cen­tral proces­sor. This proces­sor can be con­fig­ured to use these dri­ves in dif­fer­ent ways, from com­bin­ing the ca­pac­ity of all the disks to cre­ate one huge stor­age vol­ume, to pro­vid­ing ad­di­tional back­ups by hav­ing a mas­ter drive’s data du­pli­cated by other drives.

RAID’s key con­cept is re­dun­dancy. The idea be­hind the tech­nol­ogy is to pro­tect against drive fail­ure, mean­ing that, in short, a blown hard drive doesn’t mean that your data is lost or even in­ac­ces­si­ble. Some RAID types are even able to safe­guard against mul­ti­ple dri­ves fail­ing. RAID de­vices range in size from sim­ple four-bay desk­top units to much larger de­vices with 24 or even 32 bays. How­ever, for smaller busi­nesses a desk­top unit will most likely pro­vide all the pro­tec­tion you need.