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Understanding Why Offsite Backups Are Critical for Security and Safety
While your office sprinkler works great to save your office from a fire, now you are left with a server that is soaked because you failed to remove the sprinkler from the IT closet and install a high-priced dry suppression system. While this may sound like your worst nightmare, fire and flood are far from your only threats as a business owner.
Or, the burglar that broke into your office and grabbed as much as they could before scurrying away with every piece of technology that they could carry has actually made off with your data as well! It may be encrypted, or password protected, but it is still gone! Now what??!!
Fire, active shooter scenarios, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyber hackers, ransomware, burglars, and rogue employees—these are just a few of the situations that can adversely affect the security of your computer server. By having an offsite backup data storage system, you protect your business from the potential loss of all your company’s digital profile. This includes highly valuable and often irreplaceable information pertaining to financial, customer, product, and proprietary details about your company.
How Do You Backup Your Data?
Transferring data via cloud backup involves using the internet to transmit data to the cloud. This allows the data to be backed up from any location to a centralized, off-site location. Anyone who complies with proper data security measures, such as providing a password with two-step authentication, has the ability to back up digital data in an offsite setup.
What are Offsite Backups? How Do They Work?
In order to back up your data, you will need access to a cloud-based storage system. A cloud computing system allows you to store your backup data files in an offsite location via the internet. This computer server for offsite storage is heavily secured and protected specifically for big data storage.
Advantages of Offsite Backup
By hiring professionals to handle your data backup for your business, you gain a multitude of benefits. This starts with helping you minimize the costs of data breaches and cybersecurity threats.
Disaster Protection
Taking your data to an offsite storage system automatically eliminates any physical security and safety risks that your company has to deal with based on your location. This includes everything from natural disasters to manmade threats, including random acts of violence, resulting in a loss of equipment and data.
Automated Backups
By synchronizing in real-time or on a schedule with an automated system, your data backup is handled hands-free. This eliminates human errors involved with mistakes or forgetting to backup data. In addition, you can spend that time doing other tasks that are more meaningful for your business.
Access to Data, No Matter Your Location
Offsite cloud storage offers the ultimate in the portability of your company’s data. All you need is access to the internet and the offsite server to handle your data backup. This enables you to back up your company records from anywhere. You also have access to data from wherever you are located on Earth—allowing you to work remotely while handling your data transfer, storage, or accessibility.
Ransomware Security
The “fastest-growing malware threat” in cybersecurity is ransomware. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, between 2015 and 2016, Canadians saw an increase from 1,600 ransomware attacks to almost double that number.
In response, the National Cyber Threat Assessment 2018 by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security explains several of the ways cybercriminals use ransomware to attack victims. To protect against all ransomware threats, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US recommends that chief information security officers secure backups offline.
More specifically, the document recommends that CISOs “Ensure backups are not connected permanently to the computers and networks they are backing up.” The FBI also states that storing backups offline is a safe and secure way to protect against ransomware.
Simplify Data Storage
Data storage offline allows anyone within your company or team to perform their own backup to the central file servers as well. From invoices to customer service records, everything can be backed up and stored digitally within the server. Whenever someone needs access to that data, it is available as long as they go through the proper security channels. This makes data storage super convenient for all parties involved in the process rather than requiring individuals to wait until they come into the office in order to handle data applications.
Business Continuity
Your business continuity plan is the key to surviving a security threat, breach, or disaster faced by your company. This business continuity plan should cover how to handle data backups, which should be done on a scheduled basis. However, you also need to perform tests to ensure your system is going to support your business’s data storage needs. Tests of your data backup allow you to see if there are any weak or vulnerable areas, so you can provide business continuity at all times.
Offsite Backup Solutions
There are a number of offsite backup solutions. Take a look at IDS DataGuard™. This system allows SMBs to manage offsite data backup and recovery successfully. Using a hybrid cloud storage system, IDS DataGuard™ can be used for most existing IT setups.
What is a Data Vault?
A data vault is a data model from the 1990s that involves “a detail-oriented, historical tracking and uniquely linked set of normalized tables that support one or more functional areas of business,” according to the Data Administration Newsletter and the creator of the data vault method, Dan Linstedt. He also noted that the data vault is “flexible, scalable, consistent, and adaptable to the needs of the enterprise…data warehouses.”
About IDS DataGuard™
IDS DataGuard™ provides a data vault system for fully managed, wholly automated offsite backups, as well as local backups. Perform online backups of your company data while improving disaster recovery and business continuity. Choose between the basic protection level or enhanced protection based on your service needs.
At a minimum, receive our IDS DataGuard™ offsite backup solution with a hardware warranty, no recovery fees, high-performance compression, and ongoing support. Solutions depend on the size of your server and the volume of data you need to manage. Enhanced protection provides a more white-gloved approach to service and is ideal for businesses with greater security concerns than a typical company.
Choose IDS Systems for Your Offline Storage Solution
IDS Systems serves as an IT consultancy firm and leader in understanding how to backup data for small to medium size businesses. Specializing in IT and cloud storage, our company has provided the most applicable solutions and technologies for offline storage for more than 25 years. Consider IDS Systems and IDS DataGuard™ for your company’s data storage needs.
Let us help your business go with the right method for transferring and storing your digital data. Protect your company against potential risks by providing your firm with insurance through data backup and recovery services by IDS Systems.