The Importance of Physical Back-Up

We’ve all probably fallen victim to the pain of losing some important data at one stage or other in our lives, but it perhaps makes the biggest impact on small (and) big businesses since it’s very likely that a loss of important data ultimately affects your bottom line.

And businesses cannot afford that. This is why they tend to have their own data centers (likely made under the supervision of experts similar to Walt Coulston, for instance) or dedicated storage facilities, online as well as offline.

In fact, it’s just as painful losing what could be a collection of your last visual memory of a loved-one perhaps, but either way this only serves to highlight the importance of having some sort of physical back-up.

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Going Beyond the Cloud

Yes, cloud storage, syncing and backup services are growing in popularity because they make for a great way to back up your important data or merely store it, but if you come to look at it, cloud storage is nothing more than storing your data at a different location, while you maintain remote access to it via the internet. A server is nothing more than a hard drive that has had server software installed on it as opposed to the operating systems we use on our personal and work computers. So instead of it running something like Windows 7, 8, 10, Apple Mac iOS, or any other desktop distribution of Linux, your data is effectively stored on a server hard drive running something like Microsoft Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, etc. A lot of big companies on the other hand have dedicated physical servers. For additional security, they even have some of the best server racks for data centers.

That puts a whole new perspective on things, doesn’t it, because if cloud storage is hardly different to local storage, something could still happen to your data? Yes, your data is a little bit safer in that you now have at least two copies of your data housed in different locations because what are the odds of having your in-house data and cloud-stored data wiped out simultaneously?

The Need for Physical Data Storage

I’m in no way trying to take anything away from using cloud storage to protect and back-up your data, but if you think about big companies such as Microsoft, with some intellectual property and trade secrets to protect, why do they insist on making use of their own cloud storage solutions which they’ve had developed for themselves and for consumers? This is where the need for physical storage comes into play. As much as cloud storage service providers enter into a contract with their consumers to do all they can to protect their data (even from themselves), how sure can you be really that there aren’t some prying eyes sniffing around in your sensitive business affairs? Well, if you are unsure, you can take steps to secure your data at the earliest. You can either rely on cloud security solutions offered by companies such as Saviynt Inc. or take the next effort of physically backing up all the data. By doing so, you can be assured of your important company data being protected at all costs or backed up for future purposes.

There’s a reason why even brand new laptops still come with a built-in DVD/CD-Writer/Re-Writer and that is the fact that you need to store some backups of your most important and most sensitive information physically, such as on a recordable DVD or even a CD. Metal storage cabinets make for the ideal housing compartments for these physical backups, giving you the much-needed peace of mind of knowing that you can recover some of your most important data in the wake of the many electronic threats which are becoming more and more sophisticated with each passing day.

Ken
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