How To Choose The Right Backup Solution

Losing your data. One of the worst nightmares a business can have and yet if you talk to several backup providers, they will all tell you they have the best product. The prices for them are also all over the map. How can you figure out what you really need?

Do you really need to spend for something more than the basics?

Well, it really depends on your horizon.

Years ago, backups consisted of local tape drives with periodic delivery of those tapes offsite. It was cumbersome and often the tapes that were supposed to go offsite, didn’t.

Now, at a time where data systems have become critical to the survival of most businesses, modern backup usually means backing up to an offsite location or cloud.

Related: Cloud Backup Solutions

The cloud is indeed a great choice for backups as it gets the data out of the physical location quickly, but what many businesses haven’t considered is the time to recover.

At San Diego Computer Consulting, we view time to recovery as the most important factor to consider when choosing an appropriate solution. Imagine if you have 3 Terabytes of data. This isn’t an unusual quantify of data in today’s business world. Some solutions could restore the entire data and server within minutes, while others would require you to download that 3 terabytes of data over your business internet connection. If your business has a 50Mbps connection, it will mean that data would likely take over six days to restore.

Related: Microsoft Azure

Downtime Impact

At SDCC, we quantify this as what we like to call, the downtime horizon. How long could your business operate without the lack of that data causing serious impact on your profits. You could even in some cases get to the point of asking how much profit you lose per hour every hour you are down. Generally, the times can be broken down into a few categories to help you figure out what the best backup solution is:

Far Horizon – Businesses that could easily weather the storm or would just need recovery of a few critical files. These companies generally can use whatever solution is least-cost so long as it is also reliable. Companies like these can usually use a pure-cloud backup.

Medium Horizon – Businesses that must have their data in 48 hours or less. Often, these businesses can survive using a pure-cloud solution with a local cache. Solutions for this type of requirement usually are pure-cloud backups that allow the customer to place a local copy of the data on a NAS or USB drive. The data still needs to be restored, and that can take time, but it can restore very quickly.

Close/Critical Horizon – For businesses that would incur serious loss if their IT systems were down for more than a few hours or even minutes, a BDR solution is the best choice. BDR Solutions generally take backups frequently throughout the day and allow ‘fail-over’ into the BDR appliance. Essentially, you can start the server as a virtual machine on a backup appliance in your office. Additionally, these backup appliances work on the 3-2-1 principal of ensuring there are 3 copies of your data on 2 different types of storage, and at least 1 of them is kept offsite and hopefully out of the local geographic area. While the ongoing cost of this type of solution is very similar to the Medium Horizon solution in many cases, it does require the purchase of the BDR appliance which can be somewhat expensive.

 

Once you have determined which category your business falls into you are in a much better place to have a discussion with your IT provider on how to mee the requirement that best fits your needs. At San Diego Computer we recognize that there is no one RIGHT solution for all businesses. We work with several pure cloud and BDR providers to design the right solution to meet the specific needs of our customers.

Related: Microsoft Sharepoint

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