Where in the world is your data?

By Michael
July 31, 2012

There are plethora options available for housing information. Online, offline, in-house, third parties, with or without deduplication or virtualization or whichever speed-up is applicable for the format in use. Every organization has a different justification for using their particular setup, but just because something is established one way doesn't mean it shouldn't be open for review. In fact, it's one of the smartest strategies for ensuring the best possible disaster continuity plan.

On-site data hosting

Keeping everything under your roof can have benefits and drawbacks, depending on where your organization is with its overall information infrastructure. For those with less facility-oriented risks and greater IT personnel, this would seem ideal, but smaller companies may see it as their only option.

One of the leading advantages of privately maintaining backup tape is that it's cheaper. Michael Dragone of Windows IT Pro pointed out that while all corporate information used to fit on just one storage tool, many devices are now necessary to keep all viable data in one place. Expanding a system is always costly, no matter what format or office it's being used in, so tape remains popular not only for its ease of use but its ability to be managed in-house without too much difficulty as well.

Off-site storage solutions

Choosing to migrate the data warehouse elsewhere might be advised if a business has enough money to do so, but not the right personnel to manage the data itself. There are other reasons organizations may choose to ship off information rather than use their own people to watch their sensitive files, but money is usually a deciding factor. Remote Backup Online wrote that it takes one person about an hour per day, every day, to commit just to backing up data, so while hardware isn't that expensive in comparison to other storage media on the market, the man-hours necessary may not appeal to some employers.

Disaster recovery is also an element in this decision – companies in areas prone to extreme flooding, earthquakes, blizzards and other natural phenomena that would otherwise regularly put the data infrastructure at risk might choose to locate their backups elsewhere. Keeping a physical record rather than moving it to the cloud will ensure that a company does in fact know where its information actually is.

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