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Small business data: back it up

Data loss can be a serious setback for any business, but for a small company, where any kind of downtime can have serious implications for the financial health of the company and loss of trust with a particular client is a serious issue, the impacts can be disastrous. Data should therefore always be backed up, and the best approach is to have one backup on-site - on external drives or discs - and one off-site, using the services an online data centre.

On-site back up

External hard drives are a popular choice for on-site data back-up, but there are important considerations to be made in relation to solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs offer many benefits over the hard disk drive (HDD), including much faster access times and more robust construction thanks to the lack of moving parts, but they do offer some limitations. One of those is the amount of data you can hold on SSDs - you can get HDDs with much larger capacity, and the high-capacity SSD devices on offer are extremely expensive. The other issue is data recovery. Drives will crash on occasion and you may be forced to try and retrieve important data that has been lost, yet if the hardware is encrypted it can be nearly impossible. This interview with Adrian Briscoe, general manager Kroll Ontrack for the Asia Pacific region, explains why it is so difficult and he recommends using software encryption rather than hardware encryption to improve chances of recovering data from an SSD. However, there are things to be wary off with both.

Off-site back up through cloud servers

Many businesses are now storing their information in the cloud using data specialists, and doing so can be very tempting from a security standpoint. These companies survive on their ability to keep your data safe - if they couldn’t their business model would crumble. So you know that using a cloud service provider will keep your information safe from that end, but security is a chain. Once you start using a cloud service, you need to look more closely at the individual device security of everything that accesses the cloud data - including all laptops, smartphones and desktops. Mobile working may be helping businesses to work more efficiently, but more portable devices means more chance of loss or theft occurring. With cloud storage, getting hold of anything which accesses the cloud could present a risk to not just part of your data, but all of it. Every device used to reach the cloud service must be encrypted, and access to the cloud tightly controlled.

System applications

As for how often you back up, all your documents and files should be backed up daily so you’ll need a backup program to do this, and it’s worth looking for one that can also handle incremental backups, so you don’t have to worry about your temp files or recent documents. For large amounts of data - or very large files - it may not be practical to backup each day, so in this case it is worth timetabling a backup at regular intervals.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jordan Peck .