RenovoData Weekly Articles

A reliable and efficient offsite data backup service provider should offer cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery solutions.  Excessive fees can be eliminated by reducing costs associated with agents, licenses and hardware.

Agent-based solutions are usually more costly because in most cases the software is proprietary to the service provider and needs to be installed on every computer in the network.  An agent is the software that resides on the network as part of the backup process that communicates which data from a particular machine needs to be transferred to a specific remote backup storage location.  The use of agents by remote backup companies could affect the success and cost of the backup and recovery process.  For example, when agents are set up on every machine in the business, physical hardware which was destroyed have to be replaced and agents must be reinstalled on each machine to recover data following a disaster or power failure where there is complete data loss.  

Leading offsite data backup service providers employ agentless backup technology.  Agentless backup is a backup and restore process that eliminates the need for individual software installations, or agents, to be installed on target servers requiring protection.   With an agentless architecture, there is no need to install software on any other machine to have them fully backed up. If the backup machine is lost in a disaster, a bare metal restore will quickly and easily replace not only the data, but also the system state, applications, registry settings and the agent software that allows the affected computers to be restored back to their last backup state.

There are some remote backup companies which charge licensing fees.  When it is all said and done, high costs incurred by many managed service providers revolve around the amount of data that is being stored at the offsite data vault.  Most of these companies charge a licensing fee for each additional computer that is added to the network to be backed up.  Choose an offsite data backup company that only charges for the amount of data which is stored, not how many machines are in the network.  This renders a “pay as you grow” scenario instead of paying for permission to install agents on each machine. 

Offsite data backup eliminates the need for costly tape-based hardware and other multi-media devices.  The premise with remote backup is to simplify the backup process by reducing the number of hardware devices.  A sound remote backup managed service provider will provide user-friendly, flexible software, removing the reliance on extraneous hardware.

When researching offsite data backup service providers, make sure they provide the most cost effective solution for the needs of the business.  Additionally, ensure they are focusing on cutting unnecessary fees by removing costs associated with agents, licensing and hardware.  This not only saves money, but also reduces the amount of resources needed for effective data backup and recovery.

The online blogging service, JournalSpace.com, has learned a hard lesson on the importance of reliable backup after the drives that housed their entire database was destroyed.  It was reported that the bloggers behind JournalSpace depended on a dual-disked mirrored RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) system as their backup solution.  The problem with this is:  their backed up data was never truly backed up.  The rationale was if the primary drive fails, the secondary drive was thought to recover the primary drive.  However, this was a risky way of doing business in that it only provides protection from one drive.  While the RAID mirror technology would prevent the company from collapsing in the event of a single disk failure, it cannot prevent data loss due to software malfunction or disaster caused by external forces.  In the case of JournalSpace, it is speculated that a single individual was responsible for the data loss, sabotaging key servers that caused other servers to follow suit (maybe this is where “redundant” comes in).  Once the data was gone it could not be recovered even by a data recovery company since through a RAID system, when a file is wiped out from one drive, it’s automatically deleted from the other.  And to think:  this company relied on this method as backup for 6 years!

JournalSpace learned at a very high cost the reasons why the mirroring capacity through one of the many RAID configurations is not a sufficient substitution for secure backup.  If JournalSpace would have used a disaster recovery and offsite backup provider, the data would have been saved  and the business would still be operating.  A major benefit of an offsite backup solution is that generations of backup are housed through the tiered architecture whereas if there is a corrupted file, the offsite solution will “rewind” the version of the draft before the damage hits.  In this instance, the company will not only have the benefits of full disaster recovery and business continuity, but also will be further protected from being a victim of data corruption.

Fact:  According to a report by the Gartner Group, 100% of disks and tape drives eventually fail.  Are you safe in knowing you have a reliable disaster recovery plan in place?  Share your thoughts and comment below.