Importance of Data Redundancy for a Growing Organization

Contrary to popular belief, there is a fine line between data backup data replication. Data backup is basically the contingency plan, while data replication, otherwise known as data redundancy, is part of that contingency plan. In simple words, data backup is the system of having copies of your data stored locally or virtually, and data redundancy is reinforcing the backup for an extra layer of protection.

It comes as little surprise that if you are only backing up your data locally, there is a good chance that the data centers may be exposed to malicious attacks and/or malware. Hence, this compromises your backups, which increases the pressure on your main database. This is why it is advised to have another protective layer for your corporate, consumer, and confidential data.

The importance of data redundancy cannot be stated enough, especially in today’s technology-oriented business environment. When you include data redundancy in your contingency plan, you are protecting your business in the long term and setting a base on which it can grow while keeping risks low. Here are some of the crucial benefits of site-to-site data redundancy that your business needs to implement.

Reliable

Businesses, more commonly SMEs, to be precise, follow standard backup practices which involve local backups. This gives SMEs, as they believe, comprehensive control over their corporate data. As such, they can assign different levels of accessibility to make sure that no suspicious activity takes place internally. Furthermore, they reinforce security through firewalls and data encryption and start to believe they are safe.

But the question is, are they really safe? If so, then what are the protocols in case something fishy takes place in your physical data centers? More importantly though, how will your business recover from it?

When you choose to back up your data both locally and offsite, you guarantee your business protection against any pitfalls with single backup storage. In this way, you have the original data, the backup of that data in local data centers, and the backup of that backup in offsite locations, like cloud providers for example. This may be deemed as a selling point as you can guarantee your customers and clients that their data will be up and live at all times.

Your hosting provider should be able to aid you in creating another layer of security on backups. In organizations where customers and clients entirely rely on you to deliver secure and easily accessible data, this can become your selling point. Site to site data replication or redundancy helps you ensure that your clients never experience downtime even when your business enters crisis mode.

Business Continuity

Data loss is devastating for any business, especially one that is still finding its feet in the corporate circle. However, the inevitable reality with data loss is also the loss of resources and time spent to recover fundamental data for the business. In order to reduce downtime in recovery, offsite data redundancy is crucial.

An offsite data center allows you to avoid any instances where your customers and clients may become agitated and demand compensation for their personally identifiable information (PII). Offsite replication gives you the ease of restoring your operational data to the current state, reducing downtime and maintaining client satisfaction along the way.

On top of that, businesses that offer their clients offsite backups on the cloud give them a reason to invest in their solutions. This is because the clients will realize that they can access their data at any time on any device that support internet connectivity.

Customer satisfaction is critical for any business, and losing important data means you are losing part of your business. To add to that, clients who were considering referring your solutions may stop working with you. The key factor here is building trust, and that comes when your clients feel secure about their data. Hence, with data redundancy as part of your Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) plan can promote continuity that makes your clients and customers feel safe with your data management practices.

Compliance

Compliance has to be addressed comprehensively in your business environment. For example, understand the implications of:

• Data loss/ theft to your business and the penalties of noncompliance
• Data loss/ theft for your clients and the penalties of noncompliance

If your clients, for example, are mostly in the healthcare sector, they are subject to HIPAA Compliance. Hence, any case of data breach may lead to noncompliance and a hefty amount of revenues going into lawsuits. Subsequently, all your clients are subject to various regulations in regards to data protection, not just the Digital Rights Act alone. The same is applicable to your business, which only increases the importance of data redundancy.

Your organization may be maintaining the PII, personal and historical records, banking details, and transactional details of your customers. Should the backup system implemented by your client fail, your business should be geared towards salvaging the situation. In situations where your clients don’t have any backup systems implemented, your job is to make sure that they understand the perils of noncompliance, and set forth data redundancy measures to ensure they remain protected.

Scalable

Take a moment to realize the volume of data you, as well as your clients work with. Would it be counterproductive to replicate data for years? To an extent yes, and the ongoing purchases of larger data centers is only reducing scalability. As such, your clients may not actually be able to afford the increasing costs of data replication, right? Wrong!

There are many cloud storage vendors available today that offer unlimited storage capacity with comprehensive migration options for your data. Cloud storage helps you keep operational costs low and avoid downtime as the data is always live. That said, do your homework carefully before choosing a cloud vendor. The last thing you want is a vulnerable cloud setup that only exposes the data that you thought would help you survive any instances of data theft or loss.