I’ve written on this one before but today i’m going to re-address this!
While backing up data is a commonly accepted best practice among nearly all organizations, it’s important to recognize the value of always keeping a copy of backups offsite as well. That’s because hardware or software failures can corrupt data and you could easily lose all of your local backups in an outage or failure with no chance of recovery—a potentially devastating event.
I’ll give you an example from a film that demonstrated the need for exactly this. The film is called Deep Blue Sea!
The basic plot is that doctors in an underwater laboratory discover a chemical in the brains of sharks capable of reviving human brain cells. Using gene therapy the doctors create sharks with larger brain masses as a way to speed up the production of the life saving antidote. The result is a breed of Mako that is bigger, stronger, smarter, faster and more fierce then anything man has seen before. The sharks gain the ability to reason and turn on their masters resulting in an all or nothing fight to the finish between man and the ultimate predator.
This makes for an ok film but the bit i’m going to focus on is the precious cure for Altzeimers and where is was stored…. in a safe on a couple of hard drives….. really?
Now a simple risk assessment would have outlined the necessity for offsite data storage from the get go! They are underwater and if an area floods the drives could very well be lost to the “Deep Blue Sea”! I know from the film that the facility had a satellite dish so it’s safe to say they could have feasibly been able to export the data and any other backups to cloud storage.
As it turns out the data was only in one place and gets fried while one of the hero’s is electrocuting a shark…… try harder next time!!
If i had to explain that one to my boss I think he’d bite a chunk off me!
So how would they have planned for disaster and avoided the loss of the precious cure?
Let’s look at the benifits of offsite data protection and recovery!
1. More reliable – Offsite backup provides for an automated way to protect your local backup data on a daily basis, or according to a desired schedule. Because backup copies are stored offsite in another physical location or in the cloud, you have “insurance” that critical data will be available for recovery if and when needed.
2. Reduces workload – Traditional offsite backup solutions require a substantial amount of time to manually back up or copy files to tape or removable disk and then transport them to another location. This is both time consuming and highly inefficient. Many offsite backup solutions can be initiated and maintained with a few clicks and automatically scheduled once the initial transfer of backup data is completed.
3. Secure – Storing data offsite is getting more secure, especially among cloud providers. To ensure that backup data is transmitted securely, most solutions use advanced encryption tools, and offsite cloud facilities are protected with the latest in network and host security technologies.
4. Saves money – Using tape or removable media storage solutions can be very costly as data storage grows, especially if you have numerous computers with large amounts of data that you back up regularly. Offsite backup solutions, in the cloud for example, are billed on a monthly-basis and can support a near unlimited amount of backup storage at relatively low cost.
5. It’s Shark Proof! – That’s right. You can throw as many genetically modified sharks at this and it won’t make a dent!
There you have it!!!! Next time you’re doing a DR plan for an underwater science base you’ve got it covered!
This brings me on to PHD Virtual CloudHook!
Using PHD’s award-winning virtual backup appliance (VBA) in combination with our unique CloudHook technology, only PHD Virtual delivers the absolute best value in affordable, easy, flexible and secure cloud backup for small and mid-sized businesses.
Provides an easy to use, scalable, low-cost offsite storage option
Easily copy and archive backup data offsite to the cloud
Assure fast, automated reliable recovery from archived backups in the cloud
Archive from multiple source locations
Choose specific VM backups for archiving or keep all in synch
Learn more at http://www.phdvirtual.com/cloudhook/