Choosing a backup provider is a responsible task for a business owner, IT administrator, or for whatever person that makes this decision. After all, this is your business-critical data security that is at stake here.
And in this situation, this is not only the fact of whether you can get it back in case of a disaster that matters most. This is also about how long it will take for the backup service to restore your company data, in what order will they get back to you, and more.
As you can see, choosing the backup service can affect your business continuity in both good and bad ways. Whether you are choosing on-premises or cloud backup solutions for small business, medium business, or even enterprise-sized companies, there is a checklist of things to consider before you jump into the decision-making process.
In this article, we prepared for you the principal criteria by which you can “sift” the backup services, until you find the one that serves your business goals the best.
- Strong security
Backup service is not data storage you rent to just keep your data in there. Unlike cloud storage providers, backup service is responsible for your data security.
But what does it mean in practice? Here is what you should pay attention to when examining a backup service:
- Strong encryption, both when transferring (in-transit) and storing (at-rest) your data. This means that your personal and business-critical information is securely locked and cannot be read by anyone except the person with the encryption key.
- Ransomware protection. This is not a necessary request, really, and we don’t see many backup tools with the ransomware protection feature, so you’ll have to look hard. And yet, it becomes more and more essential. The new type of ransomware 2.0. is able to quietly target cloud data directly, and then seep into the backup service during the regular backup session and encrypt the backed up files.
If that happens, it may leave you with no data whatsoever unless you pay the ransom, and even then, you don’t have any guarantee of getting your data back. This is why you need a service that has at least some level of ransomware resilience.
- Trustworthiness and reputation
Settling for the new backup service is a risky venture. Just like you shouldn’t provide access to your data to any random application or browser extension out there, you shouldn’t go with service that has no reviews or credibility.
Get yourself a little busy and dig deeper into the background of a company you are planning to work with. How long they’ve been on the market? What do reviews on independent sites say about them? What is their rating? Were the company mentioned as a technology partner of Googe, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other trusted entity?
Here is the example of Google G Suite data backup service that is partnering with Google and Amazon.
- Fast and accurate recovery
Companies lose tens of thousands of dollars during the hour of downtime. The ability to restore data quickly is something on the top of every business priority list.
But it is not enough to just restore your files: the data should be organized just as they did before the disaster. This ensures the continuinity of all business processes and, as a result, no money losses due to the lost activity.
- Scalability
Whether you are a small-to-medium company or a huge enterprise, your goal is the same: to grow. As it often happens with businesses, they change, as well as the volume of data they own. This is what makes scalability one of the main criteria when you choose backup service.
If you plan to grow your business and don’t want to face overheads, we advise you to prefer cloud-tocloud backup over on-premises. This wil save you money, time, and would be a good investment in the scalability of your business.
- Compliance
Most businesses, even small, fall under some jurisdictions and have to comply with some industry or region regulations, laws, and standards. There are many compliance regulations, for example, GDPR, NIST, PCI DSS, CCPA, SOC 2, and many others.
Your business may not be an exception, so it probably falls under one or a few of these regulations. If so, than your backup provider must be compliant with the same data protection and provacy regulations as you.
This moment is highly important, because trusting data that can be quilifyes as personal or sensitive to unreliable and non-compliant backup provider may result into compliance violations. Which is, as you may know, can result into massive fines from the authorities for your company.
- Customer support
Great customer support should be one of the main selling points of a solid backup provider. There shouldn’t be any moment when you can call or text to customer support and not get the answer, desirably in a few minutes.
Check out their site: what do they write about their customer support? Can you phone them, email them, or use the chat? For how long you should expect the answer in average? Can you reach them 24/7? You shouldn’t settle for less than a provider that treats your data as if it were their own!
- User-friendly
We live in the era when everything should be easy-to-use, period. He navigation panel of your backup service is no exception. For example, you must be abe to manage your backups from different places and devices, just in case. Spending hours trying to figure out how to navigate the data management panel is not the best option, especially regarding such delicate task. So when you watch all these demos, be sure to pay attention to this detail.
Good luck!