No concept in the technology field seems more esoteric to small business owners than cloud computing. The buzzword is ubiquitous in media and evokes thoughts of flying cars, jetpacks and serious red ink on the bottom line.
Although most companies are not ready to take to the heavens for all their daily operations, more and more are starting to realize that online backup is a cloud-based solution that will improve not only the security, but the reliability of their data.
A Rough Primer on Online Backup
Online backup is the process of backing up important data to an offsite location rather than to a physical medium at the point of origin. Data is encrypted within the client software installed locally, then transmitted to a secure data center. The upshot of this is that the data is secure in a geographically remote location, ensuring its safety in the event of a disaster. Some pieces of legislation, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), require data to be secured in an offsite location for exactly these reasons.
Security of Online Backup vs. Tape
Traditional backup processes for small business include saving the backup to a digital tape and storing a copy of the current backup in an offsite location, which often happens to be the home of the network administrator. Unfortunately, a traditional tape backup may be stored on the tape in an unsecure fashion. eWeek recently reported that backup tapes were stolen from a medical care facility in New York City, exposing the names and identifying information of 1.7 million patients.
Online backup, to counter security fears of organizations transmitting private information over the Internet, encrypt data files onsite before they are ever sent across the lines. Files are stored in the remote location in a completely unusable format and are only decrypted once they are safely returned to the originating location.
Reliability Factors
Though most onsite physical backup solutions are moving to removable hard drives which are more reliable than tape, most companies are still only committing enough resources for one copy of the backup. Most small business owners are aware of the ever present danger of hard drive failure. Backup drives are not an exception to the rule.
Online backup providers generally provide not only backup, but replication. Iron Mountain, a prominent provider, data is stored in a secure underground facility and then replicated to another secure offsite location. This allows for a high level of reliability in the fact that if one data location is cut off from the Internet, the other will still be able to provide data restores.
Small Business and Cloud Backup
For small business owners, cloud backup is a viable and cost-effective option. Due to the automated nature of the system, less staffing overhead is required to ensure an efficiently implemented backup regimen. A small medical office trying to comply with HIPAA regulations can do so at a small monthly cost, requiring no additional hardware or administration.
Though most small businesses aren’t ready to reach for the clouds, they can at least let their data rest there securely and efficiently.
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