The risk of losing important official data through corruption, deletion or any other form of disaster has driven enterprises to rethink about their data protection methods.
Many companies opt for third party remote backup service that provides a befitting and reliable option for organizations willing to replicate their essential digital data to a safe remote server over the Internet and other dedicated WAN connections.
And if you want to get the best out of your remote backup product, you need to follow a set of best practices with regard to solution implementation.
The efficiency of this kind of solution depends largely on WAN connectivity, and you can use data reduction technologies such as compression, data de-duplication, etc to enable faster remote backups within your available bandwidth.
Remote backup service providers use data reduction technologies In order to realize maximum WAN efficiency, it is essential to deploy the most comprehensive suite of data reduction technologies available such as the compression and data de-duplication that can help eliminate redundant files, blocks or bytes from the backup set.
The use of delta differencing, which sends only the changed data to the backup target can also be useful.
Further the service vendors can examine your file sets carefully to remove any redundant or unnecessary files from the backup set.
Select the bandwidth level intelligently so that it meets the backup window or recovery time objective (RTO).
Bandwidth requirement can be determined by dividing the entire backup set by the maximum permissible backup window or RTO.
The remote backup service can also be utilized by using the available bandwidth by applying the scheduling technique which means suspending the backup until off-peak hours when the backup process can optimize the available bandwidth.
The service provider can consider bandwidth throttling by using (quality of service) QoS mechanism which gives bandwidth priority to backup jobs as and when they occur.
Remote backup service supports data encryption technology Data encryption technology provides the best data protection.
The remote backup service provider should implement the encryption on the server side before the data is conveyedacross WAN.
However it must it remembered that compression or de-duplication technology does not work on encrypted data once it reaches the remote server.
Moreover the backup administrators need to maintain and protect the keys, the loss of which will render the data inaccessible.
It is important to understand that data needs to be protected at the remote site as well.
At many instances, the remote backup service provider transfers disk-based backups periodically to a tape library in the same remote facility.
In other cases, the service vendors use disk-oriented protection schemes like RAID 5 or RAID 6.
Make sure that the virtual tape library or disk storage system is leveraging appropriate RAID level.
This way you can be assured of the protection of backups.
Conclusion Data backup is integral to any organization's IT operation.
Remote backup service is fast gaining popularity because of the convenience and safety it provides to the users in terms of data backup.