If you are running a business, it’s inevitable that you’d be using computers for daily business operations, number crunching, storing data, and analyzing reams of numbers that relate to your business. Computers are indispensible and data is precious. Yet, the truth is that machines breakdown. It wouldn’t be such a huge issue if it weren’t for priceless customer, financial, and business data that’d just get wiped out with it all. The reasons for data backup are simple but businesses still don’t do it.
According to a Symantec Disaster Preparedness survey for SMBs in 2011, less than 50% of the companies surveyed back up their data as frequently as a week. Only 23% of the small and medium businesses surveyed backup daily. The reasons why most businesses don’t backup could be because it’s complex, it takes time away from business functions, and companies might sometimes lack the necessary time and resources to fulfill regulated backups.
That’s where automated online backups kick in. Here are some of the benefits:
Backup surely and consistently
The biggest advantage of online backup systems is that once you configure the settings, backups happen automatically at specified time intervals and for chosen sets of data. The backup services offered by vendors are usually available 24 x 7 and the infrastructure to maintain servers and data centers is the vendor’s responsibility. Companies often also have access to a “portal” of sorts that helps you track previous backups, completed and incomplete backups, backup version histories, restores, and reports.
Diversify your data protection measures
For one, online data backup helps you to obviate the need to transport data using tapes. There’s no need for doubling resources just to cover some of your remote branches and offices which have limited or no backup at all. Online backup solutions release you from the clutch of geographical constraints. Most importantly, you may use online data backups in addition to on-location backup systems you might use already. This way, you can spread copies of your data across multiple homes so as to diversify and allow for redundancy.
Finally, you get to focus on your business
IT managers are hard-pressed to find time to do justice to their jobs. Backups should be thought of a blessing; not a time sucking curse. Online data backup or managed data backup solutions help your business focus on more important functions that relate to business growth rather than firefighting with data issues. Data recovery, data loss, data theft, and data management is all taken care of automatically. All you have to focus now is to grow your revenue, crack more sales, and coast your business along profit lines.
Online backups just make sense if you have no IT staff at all, use small data sets, no backup hardware or infrastructure, remote workers, etc. Are you using it already? How does online data backup work for you?