Selection of the provider is becoming a crucial question
There’s one thing everyone can agree on—online backup providers should be secure, with data only accessible to the user. Choosing the right provider is critical in today’s world, and online backup solution may very well work drastically differently.
Online backup is on the rise
Online backup is becoming more popular in both private and business environments. It’s a simple advancement in your day-to-day operations but makes a world of difference.
With online backup, your data is stored over the Internet in a data center, keeping it separate from the original data. This is crucial because it protects the data in a location away from your office, shielding it from onsite disasters like fires that could damage hard drives, tapes, or other storage media. By keeping the data offsite, it is less likely to be lost.
Losing critical data is costly and can be a major setback for a company. A study by Gartner reveals how drastic the effects of such an incident can be, with 80 percent of companies admitting that they filed for bankruptcy within three months of their IT systems being damaged in an office fire.
Caution: Not all online backup is the same.
Small and medium-sized companies can use online backup to set up very smart, modern and convenient data protection, giving them independence from their own IT department. When doing this independently, it increases the security and lowers the expense because no investments or changes to their own infrastructure are required.
The thing to keep in mind for small and medium-sized businesses is that not every popular cloud storage solution is suitable for them. While they may be adequate for the exchange of private, uncritical information, it might not fit their business right. Especially when the protection of critical business data is at stake, because there is more to a business backup than just shoving the data from on location to the other.
What might a sensible cloud backup look like?
Data privacy and data security are key concerns for businesses – and rightly so. Therefore, online backup customers should not settle for general, vague statements, but ask their provider specifically about security standards observed and possible certifications as well.
Another thing to take into consideration is the technical protection of data against access by third parties – who ever that third party may be. Modern online backup solutions such as airbackup by TeamViewer rely on client-side encryption of the data. This means that the data is already securely encrypted before it is transferred to the systems of the online backup provider. The encryption key is generated individually by the users themselves who should make sure that the complexity is sufficient. Furthermore, the key should stay exclusively in the user’s possession at all times. A “master key” does not exist. Because of this, not even the support staff of the provider can access the data under any circumstances. Unauthorized access to the data is not possible in the online storage or during the data transfer because the actual transfer of data itself is done with encryption.
However, in addition to security, users should not lose sight of functionality when choosing an online backup solution. The various security features should not be too difficult or impede operational processes. Backup is and will remain a secondary application that serves as an additional safety net.
Nevertheless, it can ultimately be concluded that SMEs are better served with online backup solutions than with conventional approaches.