Hi, I’m David Chernicoff, senior contributing editor for the Windows IT Pro magazine, and author of our monthly storage update newsletter. A few words about the pros and cons of internet-based data protection, and that is backing up your local servers to a remote storage site via the internet. What we are talking about here is data protection as a service. In the traditional data protection model, a significant portion of available IT resources are dedicated to backing up the data stored in the corporate servers, plus dealing with the major user support issues that exist in restoring lost data to end users.

Additionally, many businesses need to deal with the issue of regulatory compliance as related to data backup. Add all these issues together, and other common backup and restorative issues, and it is easy to see why the costs of data protection take an ever-bigger chunk out of the IT budget. I’m not going to go into details of how traditional backup is done, rather we’ll focus on how a good data protection service can be of value to your enterprise. Subscribing to a backup service means that you can deliver the same backup and restore capabilities to all sites within your organization. The roll-out process for the service is much simpler than that normally encountered for such a major component of your infrastructure. Some services offer an appliance that needs to be installed at each site, others are even simpler with just software components that need to be installed on a server that already exists at each site.

Regardless of the technical methodology used to back up the data, the key is that the data is aggregated to a local server, then moved to a secure location via the internet. Data backup services are available to provide protection for both client and server, and they can be used to protect applications such as Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Sequel Server. If you have the bandwidth to support a backup service, they are an excellent alternative to the traditional corporate backup methodology, and if you’re implementing a new backup solution, they are well worth your consideration.

When selecting a backup service provider, you need to find one that matches your needs. Don’t settle for a vendor who can only provide support for part of your infrastructure. If you are an exchange user, your solution provider should offer backup and restorative exchange server. Ideally, you should be able to restore individual mailboxes and individual messages, and not have to recreate entire servers just to restore a few messages. If you are a Sequel Server user, and your data set is of a practical size to be backed up remotely, then your provider should have sequel server support, and you should be able to configure your backup settings quickly and easily, without requiring input from the vendor.

If your business environment supports multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Unix, your provider should be able to handle all the operating systems you need to support. Overall, the backup components should be smart, doing file duplications so that multiple copies of the same data are backed up only once, rather than for every instance, reducing the amount of bandwidth needed for backup, as well as the space needed to store your data. Other bandwidth optimization should be also available, depending upon your specific circumstances.

And lastly, though it is still one of the major decision points in selecting a service, is the ease of restore. Your vendor should be able to provide a consult or an application that allows IT to restore any data that has been backed up without jumping through any special hoops just to get their data back. Make sure that you understand your backup requirements prior to evaluating a data protection service. You’ll be much better served if you know exactly what you need when going in to the project.