06-22-16 | Blog Post
The following is an excerpt taken from our disaster recovery white paper. If you would like to read the paper in its entirety, you may download it here.
Sending data offsite ensures a copy of your critical data is available in the event of a disaster at your protection site, and it is considered a best practice in disaster recovery planning. There are several offsite data backup media options available, including the traditional tape backup method that involves periodic copying of data to tape drives that can be done manually or with software.
However, physical tape backup has its drawbacks, including read or write errors, slow data retrieval times, and required maintenance windows. With critical business data that can include medical records and/or customer credit card data, your organization can’t afford to risk losing archives or the ability to completely recover after a disaster.
Disk-to-disk backup solutions are becoming the industry standard today. Achieved through snapshot replication or client-side deduplication (elimination of duplicate or repeating data) offers the benefits of speed, reduced network bandwidth and ensures a reliable checksum verified copy of production data.
Outsourcing your offsite backup to a managed services provider can provide your organization with full file-level or virtual machine snapshot restoration without the burden of installing, managing, monitoring as well as complete restoration after a disaster. Outsourcing your offsite backup to backup as a service means you can take advantage of your provider’s investments in capital, technology and expertise.
With a backup service provider, your server data is sent over an encrypted connection to an offsite backup manager, ideally far enough away from your protection site to reduce the chances of the recovery site being affected by the same disaster or interruption. Your backup service provider should have physical and logical security – meaning only authorized personnel have limited access to client data. The physical drives should be encrypted at rest to eliminate the chance of physical data theft. Access logs should be made available and tracked to provide an additional level of transparency.
Any sensitive infrastructure should be protected by restricted access, and redundancy in routers, switches and paired universal threat management devices should provide network security for your offsite backup data.
