02-21-14 | Webinar
Otava continues its business continuity series of videos on data backup and replication by identifying the risks associated with each type of backup solution.
Steven: With whatever backup solution that you choose, there’s going to be different risks. So, let’s say, you decide to keep it onsite, you have the option of just keeping the data onsite, or sending it home with a local staff member. You know, if you keep it onsite and the building burns down, your backup is destroyed.
If you decide to send it home with an office administrator, you have that possibility of the car being broken into, or the home being broken into and there’s more than enough examples in the news to verify that this is a very real possibility.
If you choose to use a third-party solution, and you don’t encrypt that data, then you’re opening up yourself to, you know, is that third-party solution, that takes your tapes offsite, have they vetted all of their employees? Will they make sure that nobody’s looking at that data when they shouldn’t be?
If you use a Cloud-based solution, then you have to ask that same question again: is that Cloud provider, or is that Cloud backup solution provider encrypting the data? Is it validating that their employees don’t have access to the encryption keys, if they shouldn’t, and that that whole process has been vetted?
So you have, as a business owner, decisions, and you need to weigh the different risks that you have. Also, the more that you do yourself, you assume more technical liability. If you decide that you’re going to do your own backup and you‘re going to ship it offsite, you have to assume the technical burden of operating the backup system, making sure the backup is encrypted, and then managing that relationship to ship the tapes or the hard drives offsite, and you have to manage that whole process. Where, generally, with a Cloud backup solution or using a Cloud provider, they take that technical burden off of your plate, and you can focus more on your business.
