Data Backup and Recovery: Benefits of Storing your Backup Offsite
November 27. 2020
Are you sure that your business would be able to sustain a power surge, major flood, or earthquake? Whether you want to believe it or not, your data availability is one of the most important things for your surviving potential. There are a few ways to ensure this availability. However, the best one is through data backup and recovery.
According to a recent study, almost 60% of small businesses fail after a big loss of data. This is the reason why more and more business owners are becoming aware of the danger. So, offsite data storage is gaining popularity. It’s the best solution for several reasons which we’ll talk about in the article.
There’s one big takeaway here. If you’re storing essentially the lifeblood of your business onsite, there’s a bit of risk involved. Your, your customers, and your employees’ information are all much more easily accessible. And since we know it’s not easy to protect your WP website, you can never be sure that they won’t fall into the wrong hands. With offsite backups, there are no such worries.
What is Offsite Storage?
Before we dive into the reasons why offsite storage is so good for your business, we need to explain what it is exactly. And it’s when data and storage hardware are located in a remote location that is away from your business. You can lease a storage solution in a remote data center, or leverage a managed service provider’s data center.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that you’ll have any problems accessing the files. You just need a computer and internet connection. With these, you’ll be able to see files as if they were stored on an external hard drive. Here’s what are the good things you can get with this storage solution.
Scalability
As we already mentioned, there are quite a few advantages when using offsite storage. In the opinion of us in the WP Full Care, the most prominent of them all is the scalability. No matter which route you go, your provider is responsible for offering storage that is expandable.
Depending on what you choose and what type of business you’re running, cloud providers can offer incredible volumes of data storage. And the best thing about it is that it’s flexible. So, you can afford not to worry at all about future-proofing or expanding your solutions.
Cost and Value for the Money
We understand that money can be a real problem for many small businesses. Luckily, cloud and offsite storage solutions are very cheap and affordable. The basic idea usually is that you pay for what you use. There are no initial outlay fees or maintenance contracts you need to think about. So, it can play out very well for you.
Additionally, there’s a lot of value in dealing with your data backup and recovery this way. Since you’re using a managed storage solution, your provider is fully responsible for the storage and hardware that is needed for it. You don’t need any additional consultants, and it also puts you in a position to choose from other additional services that can be purchased if needed.
Not only you can have backups, but you can also opt for data replication or even 24x7x365 monitoring of storage. With these, there’s practically no chance that any major incidents can occur to your precious pieces of information.
Fast Deployment and Utilization
The title of this paragraph speaks for itself. When you go for offsite storage, the infrastructure is already in place, and the platform already exists and is in use. Therefore, there’s no waiting for purchasing and installing hardware. In fact, the process is fairly similar to uploading files from WordPress form to Google Drive. You just need to call your provider, log into the cloud and you can start immediately.
You Get Managed Storage Service
Since there big companies that are offering this type of service, you can expect the industry to be developed. And that is the case here. Every provider has its own team of storage experts that own the solution and manage it for the clients. You can also choose an automated object storage deployment. This is when big blobs of data are assigned and removed when they’re no longer needed.
Additionally, the service provider is the one who deals with all the hardware failures, managing engineers, repairs, storage lifecycle and upgrade planning. As you can see, you don’t have to do anything. You get a completely managed solution for not much money. If you wanted to create something similar by yourself, it would cost you quite a bit more.
Connectivity
Connectivity is something we take for granted these days. Therefore, many people don’t even realize how convenient it is that you can access these offsite storage files via the internet. Add a dedicated virtual private network and you don’t even have to care about security.
The approach here is extremely flexible, and that’s what draws the clients. Everything is just extremely easy. Dedicated network links are there to provide high-speed data pipes between you and the storage, so the connections are always ultra-fast. This means that you can do a backup and restart a WordPress site no matter where you’re located. Which, again, can be very convenient.
Performance
We already mentioned in the last paragraph that connections are fast, so why are we coming back to this? Well, in past times offsite storage performance wasn’t that good. But, fortunately, in the past couple of years, the situation improved significantly.
There were many network improvements that all the providers gladly supported. So, now you can expect near real-time response rates. Something that was hard to believe and even impossible to achieve before. Data backup and recovery never was easier.