Toying With Data Loss? Consider Managed Backup
True story: During the making of Pixar Animation Studio’s beloved film Toy Story 2, an animator accidentally deleted 90 percent of the film, representing two years of work. Worse, the company soon discovered that backups had failed sometime previously.
Fortunately, catastrophe was averted because a member of the technical staff, who had been working from home while caring for her newborn child, had everything backed up on her home computer. The finished film went on to become one of the most profitable animated films of all time, with global box-office receipts of more than a half-billion dollars.
So, yeah, backups are important.
Nevertheless, studies find that about one-third of all computer users have never made a backup. Many report that the process is simply too much work. Even those who do perform backups often experience data loss due to accidents or oversight. Many of these people say they never test their backups to ensure they are working properly.
That is an incredibly risky approach, particularly for organizations that rely on ready access to data for their operations. If you can’t recover your data when computers crash, disasters strike or accidents happen, your organization may not recover, either.
Why Backup Is an Ongoing Challenge
Part of the problem is that backup is more frustrating and problematic than many people imagine. With data growth taxing backup technologies and processes, it can be nearly impossible to complete backups within the available window.
Increasing IT complexity can also create gaps in backup processes. According to the Veeam Data Protection Report 2023, physical and virtual servers make up 50 percent of the typical IT environment, with the other 50 percent of servers hosted in the cloud. Backup systems must be able to support all three types of servers to ensure that data is protected. However, legacy backup systems are rarely effective at protecting all these workloads.
Backup is particularly challenging for smaller organizations. With limited IT staff and budget constraints, the backup environment often gets prioritized out of the picture. Although they may understand the risk, these organizations may focus their resources on other IT priorities.
A managed backup service is a cost-effective way to reduce the risk of crippling data loss while offloading the management headaches. A qualified provider with expertise in a variety of backup environments can deliver high levels of stability and predictability.
Onsite, Cloud and Hybrid Options
IronLogix, for instance, has made data backup a core competency. We have deep experience with in-house, cloud-based and hybrid backup, and fully manage the solutions we deploy for our customers. A cloud-based backup and disaster recovery system is often the most sensible approach for smaller organizations. It requires no capital investment for equipment and makes backup an operational cost.
Hybrid backup helps ensure the redundancy that’s a key element of any comprehensive backup system. In a typical configuration, data is backed up to an onsite device then replicated to the cloud. Onsite backup enables rapid recovery when a user accidentally deletes data or a hard drive fails. The cloud provides an important hedge against large-scale failures, cyberattacks and site disasters. If anything happens to your onsite backup, you can restore data from the cloud to get your organization back up and running.
Data loss can be devastating to any organization, but rampant data growth and increasingly complex backup environments often cause organizations to take risky shortcuts. A managed backup solution can help you diminish the risk with a cost-effective and reliable system for protecting your valuable data assets. Let IronLogix show you how our team of data protection experts can safeguard your data and improve your peace of mind.