How would your business cope with a server crash or network disaster?
Backing up files is a vital move for most businesses in order to survive and thrive in these tough economic conditions.
Open source ICT specialist Stuart Mackintosh believes backup software can be used to benefit a company by reassuring its customer base and allowing it to operate within the legal data protection requirements.
However, firms will have various needs when it comes to backing up their important data, so Mr Mackintosh advises prioritising business requirements.
"Some data does not change for many years, [so] there is little point in using a real-time strategy as it is costly and will slow [down] other more important backups," he pointed out.
"However, an SQL (Structured Query Language) database may be best to backup at the application layer, as a disk recovery may not be usable, because much data is stored in the server memory and may not even be written to the disk at the time of a server crash."
In the event of an incident which wipes out a company’s network, having a backup system ready to kick in will be essential to businesses wanting to get back on their feet as soon as possible.
"An organisation must look at their data, consider the performance and capacity needed, calculate what it would cost to lose the data, work out how much could be lost [and] then consider what to invest to mitigate this," Mr Mackintosh explained. "It is rare for a single solution to meet all of the business requirements. They must consider if it is disaster recovery or business continuity that they require."
Cloud computing solutions might be ideal for some firms, while for others "tape is an excellent and reliable but complex archival mechanism for data", the expert added.