Since December last year, courtesy of Compfix DataBank, we have been running an awareness campaign to encourage businesses and individuals to back up their data with a reliable Data Backup Partner, and of course Compfix is one of the best Data Backup entities we have locally. If you missed out on the earlier articles, then now is your chance to go through them via the links provided below:
Data backup and restore by Compfix DataBank
Databank has data backup solutions for high Internet cost and slow Internet speeds problems and
DataBank offers the best backup services in Kenya
As we conclude this campaign, it is important to bring to your attention some of the factors that you need to be on the lookout for whenever you decide to partner with a data backup Partner like Compfix DataBank. Some of these factors have been mentioned in the above linked to articles and so I will only highlight them briefly.
1. Your Data Sensitivity
The question here is, what data are you planning to backup? Are they some Personal, Financial or Security sensitive data? Or is it just some publicly available data like the content of your website? A sensitive data like those that can compromise national or company security must be backed up with secure encryption with surety that no parties other than you can access the data even after a 100 years of attempted hacking. This then implies that you do not want to choose a partner whose reputation on data security is questionable.
2. The Frequency of Data Backup
An ideal situation would be your data backup should happen in real time. Every single time you edit an Invoice or generate a Financial Statement, every single time you modify a Personnel file or update your stock database, you should be able to back that data up – as – you never know when that dreaded disaster will strike. If you want to achieve a real time data backup solution, then your partner of choice is that person with the ability to handle not only yours but every of their clients real time resource requirements (e.g. bandwidth).
But the ideal situation also requires some investment on your part – and in most cases you want to compromise on some potential losses and decide to either backup data daily or weekly – depending on the calculated risk of losing a whole week’s worth of data. For small enterprises, losing a week’s worth of data may not be financially damaging, but for big companies that generate shs 10 million worth of data every hour, they’d really be crazy not to opt for a real time data backup solution.
3. Ability to backup data offline
In the second article of this four part campaign I mentioned a strength Compfix DataBank has over foreign based cloud solutions e.g. Google Drive, OneDrive or even DropBox. The disadvantage those international data backup companies have is that as a Kenyan whose Internet speed is still limited to handle huge files, and the cost of data still skyrocketing for high speed bandwidths, sometimes your best bet is to backup your data offline in an external hard disk, and be able to give your data backup partner the hard disk to upload your data in their servers on your behalf.
Sending a physical hard disk to Google or Microsoft or DropBox will be next to impossible, but Compfix is based here in Kenya and so any business that operates in Kenya and has accumulated terrabytes of data can always backup the data offline, and send them the physical hard disk.
4. Flexibility of data restoration when needed
Yes you have managed to back up your data and back it up securely if it is a sensitive data. But what is the point of struggling to back up the data if you cannot retrieve it when you need it and at the shortest time possible? Just like an ideal situation is to back up data in real time, the ideal situation is to be able to restore all your backed up data in less than a minute when needed. This is because if you are the type of a business that generates over shs 10,000,000 worth of data every hour, then every hour wasted means losing shs 10 million in potential revenues.
Well done, you have identified a partner who can restore your data in the shortest time possible, but is the data restored unblemished? When data is transferred from one medium to the other, either during backup or restoration, there always exists a risk that the data will be corrupted thus creating a potential that the restored data will not be identical with the backed up data, and this risk means there is a possibility that your data back up if not done carefully will lead to a waste of time. This is why when choosing a preferred data backup partner, it is important to ask the question, “are you able to ensure fidelity of my data throughout backup, storage and restoration stages?”
5. Support during disaster
The worst case scenario is when a disaster like a virus wipes all your data from all your systems. Or a fire happens and all your computers have been turned into ashes. Or an earthquake. When such a disaster happens, you not only need a partner who promised to restore your data unblemished and in the fastest time possible, but also a partner who can offer you all the support necessary during disaster management to ensure that your data restoration will be smooth and efficient.
It is important to emphasize at this point that you need to constantly backup your data and so it is very crucial that your chose your data backup solution very carefully. And please, backing up your data in external drives or in some other forms other than through a trusted data backup partner like Compfix DataBank is not sufficient.
