It’s March Madness time, one of my favorite times of year. Maybe it’s playing college basketball brackets with friends and co-workers that has me thinking of infrastructure strategy in basketball terms. But anyway, it occurs to me that while backup and recovery isn’t sexy, it is critical — and not always a slam dunk.
In fact, dealing with backup windows, complex file systems, data encryption and compliance issues, and planning the solution to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives — well, doing all that is anything but a layup. In fact managing this area continually can really take you out of the game and away from what drives your business.
The ideal data protection backup and recovery service is something that’s worth defining. Here are the capabilities I think every business or enterprise should look for:
- Backup service that is quick and reliable with minimal impact to client applications
- Rapid recovery of files and entire systems, locally or to systems in an alternate datacenter, to minimize downtime or disruption
- Secure transfer and storage of the backup data with strong encryption
- Above all, real confidence in the people and platform protecting your data in the event of human error, malicious attack, system failures, or natural disaster
We recently refreshed our backup and recovery platform to offer faster backups, quicker recoveries, and options for offsite storage and recovery in a secure and compliant framework. Our objective is to make backup and recovery something you don’t think much about (unless you actually don’t have backups in place).
Peace of mind is a good thing. It’s also true that backup and recovery service of this caliber is vital in many cases:
- When you need a scalable, usage-based model without any need to procure or manage a dedicated system, or provision excess capacity. For an expanding company it means that your system can grow as much as you need, cost-effectively.
- To accommodate both file and system restores so you can recover from a variety of potential issues including system error, human error, malicious attack, or outage.
- To accommodate clustered systems so you can back up your most complex environments with ease.
- When you need to be prepared for both local and off-site recovery. We help you defend all your zones: you can make a quick file recovery to the local system, recover files and systems to off-site resources, or in a rare event like Hurricane Sandy, you can recover to an alternate site.
- For quick cold-site recovery. Clients can replicate their backup data to another Layered Tech data center so they have the option to recover either to standby systems or to on-demand cloud resources. The Layered Tech eBusiness Cloud Data Center Service and eBusiness Data Protect Service give you a low-cost way to be disaster tolerant.
- When you must provide an environment that is secure and aligned to compliance requirements. In such a situation, another copy of sensitive data may not be a good idea unless you know your data is secure! Our strong data encryption, robust access controls, and change management let you ensure that your data is secure and managed for compliance.
Here’s a data protection game plan: One, backup and recovery is not sexy but it is essential. Two, when selecting your service provider you need to choose one that provides the recovery scenarios (speed of recovery, recovery location, retention, security) your business requires. Three, the best offense is a strong defense.
We have your defense covered so you can get back to playing offense and driving your business without worrying if your data is protected.
Image Credit: Creative Commons
About the Author: As Vice President of Product Management at Layered Tech, Kevin Van Mondfrans (@VANMONDFRANS | +Kevin Van Mondfrans) is responsible for driving the Layered Tech portfolio of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and managed service offerings. With more than 20 years of experience product development and marketing, Kevin has been delivering innovative computing, storage, cloud and service offering with companies such as HP, Dell, and Savvis.
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