Learn more about how SMB Solutions protects and stores your important system backups
It’s 2020 – by now, everyone has at least heard of backing up your devices and most people are practising it in one form or another. But do you actually know how backups work? Or where your data is being sent? Do you know why backups are so important?
All of this information is just as essential as the backup itself. So let’s dig in a little deeper on backups and what we do here at SMB Solutions Cloud Services.
What is Cloud Backup?
A backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original in the event of a data loss emergency or ransomware attack. More specifically, a cloud backup enables your organisation to send a copy of your cloud data to another location so that if your data is compromised, you can restore information, ensure business continuity, and defend against devastating IT crises.
There are multiple ways you can back up your data using the Cloud:
- Public Cloud Backup
Copying data directly to cloud infrastructure providers such as Microsoft Azure or AWS tend to come at a lower storage cost. However by doing this organisations run a higher risk by leveraging public space due to slow or non-existent tech support, tedious or inefficient data recovery and possible compliance issues as well as the cost and speed of data transfer.
- On-Premise, Internal Cloud Backup
Organisations with bigger budgets and existing infrastructure can consider on-premise, private cloud backup. In this arrangement, data is protected behind your own firewall and gives you complete control over internal data. This does come with a higher price though as you need to pay for your own hosting, servers, infrastructure, security and maintenance.
- Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud Backup or Hybrid
This type of backup means that some data will be backed up and stored on-premise, often in a physical form, while other data will be backed up to a cloud. Some information may be backed up in both ways. With this comes the risk of lost data if the hybrid system isn’t managed properly and a greater chance of theft with physical copies available.
- Hosted Private Cloud
A third-party private cloud is another option for cloud backup, which is what we do here at SMB Solutions for our customers. The hosted private cloud provides versatile compatibility where on-premises backup infrastructure does not. Third-party private clouds give you the comprehensive protection of an on-premise, private cloud, without the additional costs for maintenance, security, or infrastructure. Additionally, a third-party cloud satisfies compliance needs, allows for data encryption, can automate backups several times a day, conduct regular vulnerability testing and eliminates big spending with a more manageable monthly or per-user payment options available.
4 Reasons Why Backups Are So Important
Backups are an essential part of the modern-day business for many reasons including:
- Simple Data Recovery
If one of your team members makes a human error, which can happen quite often, having a backup done regularly means that most accidents can be easily fixed with a simple restoration of part of the system or the whole system.
- Peace of Mind
Having the option to easily restore anything lost in human error or in the event of a disaster means you can have peace of mind knowing your data is safe, secure and readily available if you need it.
- Avoidable Downtime
The cost of downtime in business can add up quite quickly and in those severe cases can actually cause a business to close it’s doors completely. Having a full back up of your business data means you can avoid any major downtime and the costs that come with. Check out the Datto Recovery Time & Downtime Cost Calculator to find out an estimate for your downtime.
- Business Continuity
The most important reason to perform backups is to ensure business continuity, no matter what may come your way. We have posted a 3 part series on the importance of business continuity based on disaster recovery, ransomware protection and cloud-to-cloud backup.
How do SMB Solutions Cloud Services perform backups?
At SMB Solutions Cloud Services, we used a program called Veeam to assist in our automated backups done for every component of our infrastructure every day. In addition, we also utilise an off-site duplication process with Veeam to keep these backups available for quick restoration into alternative cloud locations for disaster recovery.
In our Singapore data centre, we also utilise an additional backup platform and server device called Datto Siris to duplicate our infrastructure to off-site cloud retention and it also allows us to spin up any component of our infrastructure as a virtual server in case of component failures.
We schedule our backups to run once a day but you can choose additional backups of your data (for an additional fee) once every 15 minutes or just about anywhere in between.
Unlike other backup software, Veaam does not impact performance when running. We have our entire system backed up with bare metal server backups which allow us to choose to just restore certain files and folders or a complete server.
To save space, backups are incremental so only files which have changed are backed up. By default, we set 10 recovery points, which means we have the last 10 back-ups to choose to restore from.
Visit our website for more information on our backups and prices, or get in touch with the SMB Solutions support team today to learn more.