Telecom Lead India: Enterprises are creating vast amounts
of digital content every day -documents, spreadsheets, scan images, photos and videos
– all of which are crucial for the business in unique ways and are just a crash
away from being of any use at all. While it’s the prevailing practice to backup
files to an external hard drive, an online backup service offers many other
advantages. Today with even more emphasis on “cloud computing,” it
only makes sense that enterprise should take advantage of this new trend in
technology for backing up their crucial data.
Online backup is not only a convenient way to preserve
your key files but an increasingly popular way to make sure you never lose a
file. Online backup services offer several advantages over backing up to an
external hard drive. The data itself is actually safer than at your home or
office because it’s stored in a secure server farm. If your home or office is
damaged or destroyed — by a fire, say — the data is out of harm’s way. Plus,
most service provider will save multiple copies of the data and the data
centers have backups of your backups in case there’s a disaster at the data center.
To ensure cost effectiveness, data integrity and security
online data backup services usually de-duplicate the data; i.e. removing
redundant copies of the same data and keeping only a single copy with multiple
references, and encrypt it while taking the data out of the enterprise premise
and while at rest once it reaches the service provider location. There are
various types of encryption mechanisms available with the most preferred one
now is the 256 bit AES encryption in which the data owner retains the
encryption key, without which the data cannot be accessed.
Few other things which should be kept in mind while
creating an online backup policy for organizations are block level backup,
strong management consoles, device agnostic backup, mapped drive backups,
operating system backup, backing up and restoration time and speed and service
provider certification.
The backup as service offerings comes with various hue
and cries. Whereas pure play online services are more suitable to individual
needs it have limitation when it comes to the enterprise backup space. The
perceived limitations are in taking initial data backup, in time and quick
restoration over the internet in case data is lost and multiple variations of
which files are backed up and which are not. For example a few of the most
widely used online services do not backup program files and the OS data. This
limitation allows the growth and prevalence of the hybrid model of online
backup and storage. In this the best suitable option pertaining to a particular
enterprise need is addressed with a combination of features and skills. Another
important aspect is the support services provided by the backup service
provider. As time is of the essence when it comes to locating and restoring
data, the availability of an expert hand is a good to have assurance.
Finally, businesses need something that is simple to
setup, worry free, and requires little to no learning curve. A
set-it-and-forget-it type of solution is ideal for enterprises with a reliable
service provider.
Krishna Naraya Basudevan
Head of products and Alliances at Aircel Business services
