Online and offline data backup services are becoming increasingly popular with smaller companies who are looking for a cost effective data-management solution. While being more popular, there are some serious drawbacks.
Offsite backup services are essential to keeping data safe. There is a very common saying in the world of information technology. There are those companies that have lost data, and there are those that will. Traditionally, backup services using tape technology have been the most common because tape is a very stable medium of data storage, and tape copies can be made at very high speeds. Online and offsite backup services are becoming more popular where there are much smaller volumes of data that need to be protected. There are a number of reasons why this relatively old technology is still in use today. We can see the advantages of tape backup services by looking at the disadvantages of online methods.
- Speeds. Even with the fastest internet connections, backup speeds are still very low with online services. Even including the physical delivery time, it can be much faster to retrieve large volumes of data from a tape.
- Security of Data Transfer. Even with the most advanced technologies, we still risk breaches in security when we transmit data over an internet connection. With tape, our tapes are stored in a high-security building and transported in high-security vehicles.
- Cost Per Volume. While the total cost of tape storage and management will be higher than online services, the cost per unit of data is higher for internet based backup services. This is because they focus on lower volumes of data that cannot compete with the super-huge volumes of information protected with tape management.
- Restoration Time. If you do have a data failure, retrieval time will be the same as it was to backup. Again, this can be slower than with traditional tape management when you have a large volume of information to restore.
- Internet Connection. The loss of an internet connection means you cannot backup your data, and you cannot retrieve it. This failure can be out of your control. Public utilities may fail and therefore, your company’s processes can be interrupted. This is one of the main reasons why tape management services are strongly recommended by information security professionals. Tape management is designed to be completely independent of all services and architecture.
- Limited Capacity. Even the largest volumes of information that can be stored with online services are minimal compared with tape storage. Tapes can store huge volumes of information compared with their physical size. Even the largest hard drives do not store anything near the volume on one single tape volume.
Offsite data storage is normally the second line of defense for your information storage. Your company should have internal procedures on how to manage all data, whether it is currently being used, or it has been put away for future reference. It is important you have workplace procedures, and your people are taught and monitored with compliance training and evaluation. People are often the weak link of our data security and management processes.
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