It?s easy to forget the purpose of cloud online backup services. In our hurry to check the box we don?t think about what it is and why it?s a better option than the alternatives. Original notions of backing up and the copying of documents date back to before the printing press, when copying something had to be done by hand and was very labour intensive. Not exactly a sustainable model.
Where it began
First of all it?s important to remember that the idea of ?backing up? records isn?t a new one by any stretch of the imagination. For many years records of all types of documents have been kept as copies in offsite locations in order to ensure the continuance of business but also to ensure the safety of the documents. Two sides of the same coin I think you?ll agree. For obvious reasons this type of paper backup and document storage was very expensive and could only be done for a relatively small number of high value documents. It became more feasible when the idea of the carbon copy became a reality in the 20th century but even at that it was never ?viable for many businesses.
After Paper
Next in our innovative frame came the microfiche a literal photographic copy of a document so it could be viewed and even reproduced but even this was an expensive system requiring specialist equipment.?Then we moved on to the taped backup. The first true backup system where documents could be backed up relatively cheaply and taken offsite for storage. This finally made document and data storage viable for small and medium sized businesses who want to implement business continuity and disaster recovery plans, although they might not have called them this at the time. A natural extension of this was portable hard-drive backup systems.
Revolution
The real revolution has come with the implementation of high bandwidth communications networks which have enabled the transfer of large amounts of data relatively quickly. And with this came the possibility of data transfer to offsite locations. Still data storage innovations took a while to catch up to make data storage relatively cheap and compact. So it is only during the last 6-8 years that online backup was become viable and cost effective. The development of cloud processes and technologies and an increase in efficiencies has reduced these costs still more.
Advantages of Cloud Backup
The advantages of the cloud online backup approach are obvious.
- It is relatively cheap
- Can be paid for by consumption
- Automatically brings data offsite
- Can be mirrored to multiple locations
- Can be automated so it doesn?t take up resources
- After initial backup only new or changed files are backed up reducing bandwidth costs
The cost savings are large and obvious to the extent that it now finally makes sense for almost any business to have an online backup of their business data.
Recent Developments
Other more recent developments are the ability to not only back up this data but to secure it both in transport and in the data centre itself. This can be done with encryption. As well as this automatic health checking and healing of data if it becomes corrupted is now possible, so your data files can be re-checked against the originals and if there are differences then the original is backed up again.
As you can see we?ve come a long way in how we keep our business data safe. Reducing costs and labour along the way. The main driver of cloud online backup is businesses themselves who are always looking for a more suitable and more cost effective solution to managing risk. As more and more business ask themselves the question ?Can we survive losing our data?? the answer is more and more that it?s a risk that you no longer have to take.
Tags: data storage, file storage, microfiche, ONline backup, taped backup
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Cloud Backup, Cloud Disaster Recovery, Cloud Online Backup.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Source: http://www.savenetsolutions.ie/blog/how-are-you-protecting-your-data-online-backup-or-files-in-a-box/
the weather channel national grid LIPA MBTA Cnn Live Garcinia Cambogia Little Things One Direction
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.