Data disaster is everywhere. Ransomware threatening to hold your data hostage, disgruntled employees wanting to demonstrate dissatisfaction, and even employees that aren’t data risk savvy can all pose a risk to your business. However, reliable, consistent and secure data backup can help you protect your business for the long term.

What is data backup?

Data backup and disaster recovery is essential to today’s businesses. In a world so dependent on data, data loss can cripple a business.

Whether it’s customer payment data, strategic plans, product lists and ingredients or even manufacturing logs, data loss or lack of availability can cause substantial financial losses for your business. And data loss isn’t always a result of malicious behaviour, it can be a result of faulty equipment or even human error.

By backing up your data, you reduce the risk of data loss and insure against malicious data theft, helping to ensure the continuity of your business and mitigate the effect of any data downtime.

However, backing up data can be complex.

  • Does your team have the skills and knowledge to set up or run regular backups, and to understand the data and drives that need backing up?
  • Do you know where to backup your data to ensure it’s safe and accessible by the right people?
  • When should you run your backups? Ideally, backups should be run when processing power isn’t needed for other operations, but often this is in the middle of the night.
  • Then there’s the ongoing storage. Storage costs money, so how long should you store data, and how is it stored safely?

Data backup can be a full-time job in itself. That’s why so many businesses prefer to outsource their data backup.

What does it mean to outsource my data backup?

Outsourcing your data backup means contracting with a data backup provider like ASL. Usually, these services are purchased on a subscription pricing model, so you know exactly what you’re expected to pay and when you’re expected to pay it. However, you don’t have to worry about the cost of the staff to run the backups, the security of the data backed up, or the potential fluctuations in data storage costs which can increase or decrease according to how much data you have backed up.

Reasons to outsource data backup

  1. Reliable

Some organisations know they need to backup data, but it can be a loose arrangement executed by the IT manager or, for smaller businesses, by the admin staff. However, the risk with this approach is that one week can easily run into another and, before you know it, you’ve not backed up your data for several weeks or months and key documents are vulnerable.

  1. Expert support

Other organisations may fastidiously backup at a certain day or time each week or month, and while this avoids the risk of data not being backed up regularly enough, the data backups carried out may be conducted by inexperienced staff who either; back up data and drives that don’t need to be backed up adding to your data storage cost, back them up to the wrong place compromising your data security, or perform backups incorrectly risking data loss altogether. By outsourcing your data backups to an a company like ASL, you can be confident that your data backups will be done reliably, in a secure way, and with consideration of the need to balance data storage requirements with data access needs.

  1. Make data storage cost savings

By outsourcing your data backups, you could benefit from lower-cost data storage as data backup service providers have the benefit of buying data storage space in bulk and passing some of that reduction in the data storage cost along to their customers, reducing the per-gigabyte cost of data storage for the space that you need.

  1. Disaster recovery

However, the most critical benefit of outsourcing your computer backup to an organisation like ASL Is their disaster recovery service. ASL’s disaster recovery service can be tailored to meet the needs of each of our customers, whether they use physical or virtual services and there is no cost for compute until Disaster Recovery is actually invoked. With ASL’s disaster recovery service, you can ensure that one bad move by a naive member of staff won’t result in substantial volumes of irretrievable data. Because, while your data may be inaccessible, you’ll have backups you can rely on and access quickly and easily when you need them.

For more information on choosing to outsource your data backups and disaster recovery, visit our website ASL-Group.co.uk or contact us on 0345 207 7000.