September 7, 2010
Managed Backup Solutions
Data is the lifeline of every company. When it comes to protecting your most valuable asset, no precaution should be spared. Preventing data loss, corruption, and disclosure of sensitive information from unauthorized access, a server crash, malicious attack, human error or a natural disaster is critical to the long term success and staying power of any business. In today's information economy, companies are looking for a technological edge that improves their system security, increases performance and reduces cost.
Implementing a data backup solution is not enough in itself. It needs to be supervised, updated and tested continually to ensure all data is successfully backed up as planned. Because of the time and capital expense involved with managing, monitoring and testing a backup system daily in-house, more and more business decision-makers are opting for a managed backup solution. This means outsourcing the management of this critical function to a company with special expertise so they can allocate their in-house resources to more effective and efficient areas for the future success of their own company.
Managed data backup systems are convenient data storage solutions that enable businesses to automatically and securely store all their critical data off-site while spending less capital and administration time dealing with their implementation, management and updates. Since a managed backup solution necessitates you trust your company's most valuable asset to a third party, it is important that you choose a provider with an immaculate professional reputation, third party certifications and extensive experience in data backup management.
Six important items to look for when choosing a quality service provider:
- Highly effective online managed data backup service that utilizes multiple layers of security.
- Third party certifications (i.e. SAS 70, FIPS 140-2) that speak to their security and training in areas like Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
- Management of your backup and recovery operations under strict Service Level Agreements (SLA's). This will allow you to focus on your core business priorities, while retaining ownership of your backup technology.
- Comprehensive customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Continuous monitoring of the system to ensure successful backups are completed as scheduled. Remote management with round-the-clock monitoring, incident management, performance of restore requests, planning and optimization assistance, and regular reporting. Incidents are addressed in a timely manner using your existing storage management queue with supplemental root cause analysis performed on high impact problems.
- Plan and optimize operations from change management monitoring to patch management, domain client configuration alterations, retention and deletion policy setting and storage capacity forecasting, to name a few.
Every company needs a data backup system that ensures them maximum data protection and security. This can mean the difference between uninterrupted business continuity and complete dysfunction of all essential business operations or even going out of business in the face of an unexpected data loss emergency. This need is heightened by increasingly strict government compliance regulations, an exponential growth in corporate data, and a broader range of data being used to support critical business operations. If you keep the above things in mind, you should have success when you outsource your backups to a Managed Service provider.
CoreVault, America's most endorsed cloud backup and recovery solution, identifies, protects and manages your business's most valuable asset. Their tailored and managed services will automatically store and encrypt your business's critical data off-site at their private data centers with 24 x 7 customer support. You also get to enjoy technologies and benefits like monitored backups, data deduplication, local storage, 4 levels of data recovery 24 x 7, continuous data protection (CDP), hosted data services, CBRM certified engineers and SAS 70 Type II certified facilities.
About the Author: Jeff Cato is V.P. of Marketing at CoreVault, an online data backup and cloud based data storage company located in Oklahoma.