Aug 10
18
The Importance of Offsite Backup
Are You As Safe As You Think?
- 25% of all PC users will suffer from data loss each year.
- 80% of small businesses that experience a major data loss go out of business within 1 year.
- 15% of all laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures.
- $12 Billion – The annual cost of data loss. Can you afford not to back up your data?
- 95% of all business workstations are not being backed up.
- $55 Billion – The annual cost of virus related damages to U.S. businesses.
Regardless of whether your company has a large or small amount of data, it’s vital that this data gets backed up. With hundreds of offsite backup services to wade through it’s important to understand how offsite backup works, the differences between providers, and the hard and soft costs associated with offsite backup and data loss.
Offsite Backup at its most fundamental description is protecting your data by copying it offsite. This fundamental definition is where the similarities between offsite backup providers end. To understand the intricacies of offsite backup we will examine 4 separate technologies.
Encryption
Most offsite backup providers use some kind of encryption to “scramble” your data before storing in their data center. The encryption methods vary greatly from provider to provider as each of them have opinions on the level of security each encryption method has. MySecureBackup from Vertex Consulting Group encrypts your data using the AES-256 encryption method – this method is trusted by the U.S. Government to encrypt it’s top secret documents. It is also important to note that with MySecureBackup your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer and not upon arriving at the data center. Encrypting your data before sending it through the internet ensures that anyone “listening” in the middle cannot gain access to your data.
Data Centers
Most offsite backup providers (including those who advertise heavily) store your data in a single data center. The downside to your data residing in a single data center is that disasters, failures, and service interruptions can and do happen at data centers. MySecureBackup from Vertex Consulting Group stores your encrypted data in multiple geographically disperse data centers ensuring the reliability and accessibility of your backups in the event that you need them.
Block-Level Updates
Almost all offsite backup providers charge for both storage usage and bandwidth requirements. Block-level updates reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth required by only uploading parts of the file that changed, and not the whole file itself. Block-level update technology provides reduced backup times, and reduced storage costs. No cost bandwidth usage, block-level updates, and low per GB storage costs makes MySecureBackup from Vertex Consulting Group the best in class offsite backup solution for your business.
Configurable Retention Policies
Almost all offsite backup providers have little or no flexibility for backup retention policies – keeping only the most recent backup, or keeping too many backups. This can have a disastrous effect because on average 4 days lapse before a user realizes a file was accidentally deleted, or was corrupted. A backup retention policy that only keeps the previous backup job provides no protection against a situation like this. On the other side of the spectrum some providers retain backups for months, and in some cases years. Although some business models require the ability to restore from a backup taken months ago, they are the exception and not the rule. MySecureBackup by default provides a retention policy of 30 days but is configurable for more or less restore flexibility. Configurable retention policies paired with block-level updates provides you with a custom offsite backup solution designed for your budget and business model.
Data Loss Costs
In order to better understand the trust cost of data loss we must first examine the causes of lost data.
40% of data loss comes from hardware failure.
29% of data loss comes from human error.
13% of data loss comes from software corruption.
6% of data loss comes from viruses.
9% of data loss comes from theft.
3% of data loss comes from hardware destruction.
The hard costs associated with data loss are typically very apparent and include replacing the lost, stolen, or damaged hardware. The soft costs associated with data loss are often over looked. Soft costs include the cost of continuing without the data, the cost of recreating the data, and the cost of notifying users in the event of a compromise.
A national computer security association survey reported that without adequate offsite backup it takes:
19 days and $17,000 to recreate just 20 MB of sales and marketing data.
21 days and $19,000 to recreate just 20 MB of accounting data.
42 days and $98,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost engineering data.
MySecureBackup from Vertex Consulting Group is the best in class offsite backup solution for your business.
