The Importance of Enterprise Data Backup

In today’s widespread usage of computers among business, data backup is becoming a key issue. Data shows that computer’s usage in enterprise office has reached more than 95%. With the new conception of cloud computing, virtualization and mobile, the high computer usage rate has been a serious threat to data security. Data is the lifeblood of enterprise in some way, the important data, like e-mail, financial statements and employee records are the key data. Without them, a company could not operate smoothly. Enterprise has recognized the conception that the information is also assets. Then, how to protect the information assets has become a top priority in data security.

The Importance of Enterprise Data Backup

1. What Should Enterprises Back Up?

• Financial Affairs: Financial data plays a key role in the enterprise operation and those sensitive numbers indicate the strength of enterprises. All the enterprise operations will be forced to stop once the financial data lost. All programs and transactions must be stranded due to the uncertainties and cause direct loss of business.

• Human Resources: HR Department provides strong backup to an enterprise and it’s fundamental department to select talented person. As we all know, talented person reflects the core competitiveness of a company. It is an important part to protect and manage the data of HR Department effectively if one company wants to be growth and development.

• Clients: It’s obvious that the Clients information are important. As an important support for the development of enterprises, once the client’s information data is lost or stolen by competitors, the effect is a disaster of course.

• Intellectual Property: Product research and development are prime survival in enterprises. As a basis of key competitiveness lies in an important asset owned intellectual property rights, the number of patents, such as technology, design, creativity and so on, these are enterprise wealth.

2. What Are the Causes of Data Loss?

The relevant statistics shows that, in all causes of data loss incidents, only 21% incidents were attacked by viruses, Trojans, worms and hacker and another 79% were caused by hardware and software malfunction, the erroneous operation by staffs and other reasons. Most small and medium-sized enterprises only install anti-virus software and firewall to protect data security, that is to say, those kinds of protection has no use to 79% security threaten. Every company should pay more attention to the situation.

Since installing anti-virus software and firewalls could only protect 21% data security, many companies have realized the importance of backup, to establish data backup solution is the most thorough and effective way to protect data. However, since the data backup does not improve companies’ revenues directly, those small and medium enterprises with limited budget delay the backup program. Until the data and file were lost, those enterprises were too regret to ask help from data recovery company with the high charge. It’s hard to evaluate the result because none of the data recovery company could restore the lost data 100%.

3. The Solutions to Protect Data Security

Those problems faced by small and medium enterprises in data recovery harass system administrator with high demand and restrict the development of enterprises as well. There are three main solutions to protect enterprise data security.

• Regular data backup and updates. To set up a regular schedule to backup data can avoid accidental data loss. Besides, the system administrator should transmit to the backup system over the network in real time and backup system is updating according to the log on the disk. Since the enterprise data is huge and complex, it’s important to choose the professional and reliable server backup software to protect data.

• Offsite Backup. Enterprise usually uses three steps to do offsite backup. Firstly, to use remote and CD backup system, that is, to transfer the data to a remote backup management center and then make a full system backup as CD or disc. Secondly, create a backup copy on a separate machine from the master database. Thirdly, for the remote data disaster recovery, system and file backup is not only requiring the offsite backup but also to make sure the backup of integrity and utility.

(3) It’s essential to consider practical ways to disaster recovery when to establish of multi-WAN failover mechanism to improve data disaster recovery system.

With the advent of information and technology era, data backup and restore are becoming the foundation of enterprise business sectors. To improve the awareness of data security and protection concept will make enterprise moving forward steadily in the fierce competition. “The Importance of Enterprise Data Backup” is a guest article written by Connie Lin.