Offsite backup facilities help promote better continuity
The number of threats imposing themselves on businesses continues to grow each day as infrastructures become more diversified. The impact of cloud, mobile and virtual data resources has spread some businesses too thin and left others without a unified backup to call their own. When firms in these scenarios are challenged by outages, thefts or disasters, they may buckle without anything to restore their resources from.
Officials in St. Clair County, California, reported that they would be implementing an offsite tape management solution in response to a major disaster that nearly took the entire region’s government infrastructure offline. The Times Herald reported that a substantial electrical fire took down part of the data center that serviced Macomb County, one of the neighboring municipalities. When this occurred, the fire, police and other emergency services in the area were not able to access their records. The facility had no backup disk or file tracking capabilities due to its solitary information outlet, showing how ill-prepared even government agencies can be.
Building new remote resources
The source reported that St. Clair County received a significant grant to facilitate the creation of an offsite tape management resource at a second location, as well as repairing the first. The new tape management site will be part of the St. Clair County Intervention and Detention Center, allowing Macomb to make use of the valuable human resources and software services currently in play at the secondary location.
Philly Online wrote that having a redundant data outlet makes it much harder for organizations to ever be without access to their vital documents. This has made it popular for even small entities to find ways to partner with offsite tape management and disaster recovery providers if they can’t implement their own such tools. Remote storage reduces the likelihood of a backup error and ensures that there is less chance that a natural disaster or theft event will be able to negatively impact an organization’s operations.
As more services become available to businesses, they must be careful not to spread their assets in too many directions. They need to ensure that they have a centralized resource of backup information, as well as a secondary disaster recovery outlet in the event of a catastrophe. Though more technology assets can make companies more flexible, they can also introduce more threats that could jeopardize continuity.