Backing up and restoring digital data in the cloud by Compfix DataBank
Listen to these statistics about loss of enterprise data contained in a December 2014 Press Release by EMC²:
- Data loss and downtime costs enterprises $1.7 trillion each year (that’s more than shs 170 trillion annually)
- Companies on average lost 400% more data over the last two years (equivalent to 24 million emails each)
- 71% of IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident
- 51% of organizations lack a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads; just 6% have plans for big data, hybrid cloud and mobile
- Only 2% of organizations are data protection “Leaders”; 11% “Adopters”; 87% are behind the curve
- China, Hong Kong, The Netherlands, Singapore and the US lead protection maturity; Switzerland, Turkey and the UAE lag behind
- Companies with three or more vendors lost three times as much data as those with a single-vendor strategy
Data loss can be painful. Bloggers Association of Kenya and several others have been undergoing a lot of stress since the data they stored with Angani in form of web hosted files became inaccessible. According to a Blog Post by Compfix DataBank, in Kenya alone individuals and organisations lose up to 45 terabytes of data annually, leading to an unaccountable financial losses.
Those statistics reveal two things: 1. There is a huge market for data backup solutions and 2. There is a more than huge need for data backup enterprises to sensitize businesses on the significance of data backup. It is the for the second reason that I write this article.
One way to have your data backed up is to physically have copies of your files in an external storage device like an external hard disk. But I have a story to discount that. My friend Fred is an IT Manager, meaning he handles a lot of data on behalf of his company. As an IT guy you expect him to understand and appreciate the importance of data backup, and he does – and that’s why he always constantly backs up his data in an external hard drive.
One fateful evening when I was leaving Nairobi for Nakuru, Fred had to come and see me off. He had to park his car far off. After roughly an hour he went back to his car only to find that they had broken into it and took his laptop bag in which was the laptop, a few other valuables and the external hard disk for backups. Both the primary and backup data was gone – he had to start from scratch. He retrieved a few from email attachments, others from work colleagues, but there were many other files he couldn’t retrieve.
That’s how I too lost my precious videos of my two weeks crying baby and his favorite MP3 songs. I was confident that having those files in two phones and the laptop were sufficient backup. Not until I lost one of the phones, then in a few months the second phone crashed leaving me with the data only in the laptop. Before I was able to back back the laptop data to an external storage device, the laptop died never to wake up again.
Those two stories clearly show how external data backup are not reliable. In today’s world of cloud computing, the only reliable backup solution is a cloud based storage facility. For individuals who deal with a few MBs worth of files the cloud platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive by Microsoft, and DropBox may be sufficient. But for small businesses and big enterprise companies that deal with gigantic data in the range of gigabytes and terabytes, enterprise cloud based data solutions is what they need, and one such data backup and restore cloud based enterprise is Compfix DataBank.
Compfix DataBank is a Kenyan cloud data backup company that offers automated cloud backup solution hosted in Kenya. The data backup by Compfix DataBank have three integral parameters to ensure 100% availability of data upon request to restore: 1. There is the data integrity check during backup process using Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) to detect errors and act on those errors or warn data owners about corrupted data, 2. The periodic data integrity checks using the same CRC to ensure that data integrity is maintained throughout the backup storage period. This then guarantees 100% data restore upon restore request, and 3. Data encryption by use of AES 256 encryption algorithm specifically useful when clients need to send data to Compfix DataBank by use of physical storage devices. As Compfix DataBank notes in their website, “Backing up is one thing. Knowing that you can successfully restore your data files is something else altogether. What if the backup data is corrupt?”
As a business or an individual that deals with huge chunk of data, it is highly recommended that you protect your data not only from data breaches, but also from data losses that may occur due to the data breaches or any other form of accidental loss. As noted by the statistics from EMC, “71% of IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident” so the best safeguard would be to invest in a cloud based backup service.