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Online Data Backup Provides a Network without Boundaries

An online data backup system will give you a network without boundaries. This becomes possible with the combination of secure authentication, data encryption, and a high speed Internet connection. Managers have grown to expect the ability to provide their employees world wide secure access to their networks systems. Allowing them to work from almost any location and make decisions the latest and most up to date information. With ever increasing speed of corporate bandwidth connections, CIOs are discovering that they can extend many elements of their network into third party networks. One of the first areas to take advantage of this situation is to provide offsite backups.

This use of online access to network resources, and online backup of network resources, gives a network administer the ability to both backup and restore lost data from a remote site with speed and ease at any hour of the day. No more driving into the office at 3:00 AM to restore a mission-critical database, when you can just log in from home and make it happen. Aside from the definite convenience it also reduces downtime as a result of transportation required for physical access to the system.

Getting Online Data Backup up and Running

Online data backup is usually a fairly simple process to implement. The specific steps involved could be as simple as zipping a folder and e-mailing it to another location, or as complex as scheduling incremental backups across the local network to a central location which is then encrypted and uploaded to another, or several other networks' storage system. Before you even begin to look for a provider of online data backup solutions you first need to make a fair evaluation of how much you real need to backup, how often, and by how much your needs will grow over time. Finding a provider who's capabilities can accommodate your expanding needs is just as essential as getting the best price on meeting your current needs.

You will also wish to consider the physical location of your online data backup service's storage. Is it really enough to have your data backed up accross town? Or would you prefer to have it across state, out of state, or overseas?

Online data backup is a fairly simple process to understand. It's not much different than attaching a file to an email and sending to another location. Deciding on the online data backup service you are comfortable with will mean deciding on whether your service needs to be local but on the other side of town, out of town or out of state and how far away that state can be, or choosing to go really way out and have your online data backup service located .

Several other decisions will need to be made before you begin to research price and storage amenities. You will need to know how large a volume of data you will be needing to backup and what the growth rate is for that data. You will also need to know what your recovery process involves and what level of access do you need to your data. Some companies identify the critical data as top priority with several groups of data following the priority data.

Online Data Backup Tools

The tools used for Online data backup are vary from provider to provider and will depend upon the complexity of the of the service required. The simplest may only require a data compression tool to compress the date into a file, followed by an upload using either e-mail or FTP. The more complex may require a client software running on one of your servers that is in constant contact with the remote network; compressing, encrypting and uploading data on your local network and uploading these backups to online storage locations.

The more sophisticate versions of these applications allow for complex scheduling of backup tasks to avoid active use of the data, remote administration to increase the effectiveness of your network administrators, and fast, simple restores when it is necessary to recover after the inevitable loss of data.

Authorization to access or restore data can be tiered and specific to a file, set of files or folders and likewise authentication of the user or administrator can be enforced at several layers. To ensure the security of your data you must ensure that the online data backup software includes not only authentication but also encryption of your data. Encryption should happen before the data is sent out of your network and should be decrypted after it arrives back on your network.

A Simple Way to Save with Online Data Backup

Most online backup services will charge you a monthly fee for the loading and storage of your data. When you ask for a quote ask for a quote using the full, uncompressed size of your data. This gives you a little play in the numbers because you will be compressing your data before encrypting it and sending it. Compressed data, of course, is smaller in size that uncompressed data and will use much less storage media.