Do you possess any servers or critical PCs on your own network? Obviously you are doing, in today's business they may be critical. But does your communications system use a server? It is worthwhile to find out, although you may not know. Solutions from companies such as ShoreTel may not rely on the server for voice traffic, but critical applications such as voice mail and voice mail storage are on the server. Other solutions from companies including Cisco or Microsoft are server reliant, creating a backup strategy much more important. Many companies have backup techniques for their servers; sometimes it is local, sometimes towards the cloud, or both. Generally our recommendation is that businesses use a strategy that spreads the risk among cloud and local backups for your communications servers. online backup
A combined strategy can be quite a business solution that means the main difference between getting you way back in running within a few minutes or days. Local backups are great as you are able to get your servers running fast if you experience a failure as you can restore service quickly and easily using your stored databases. Generally the local backup is to several places together with a partition around the server itself, a separate drive within the server, a dedicated backup server, tape drive, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, or possibly a flash drive connected to the server. But what happens if the backup is corrupt, or there is a disaster that renders these unusable? computer backup services
This is when cloud backups become important. Generally a cloud backup will back up the whole designated device the 1st time and subsequent backups only include files who have changed. Usually this first backup will take several hours to your day or so. If the backup is done during business hours, depending on the service chosen this could clog your local or wide area network. Other services have a different backup and approach within the background. This means that the initial backup may take a little longer, but you probably will not notice the effect on your network. However, in both cases the size of the drive will affect the time it will take to backup the drive.
There are various companies that can provide this service. One of the largest and oldest is Carbonite. Carbonite's method could be purely cloud or local and cloud based. The pure cloud backup from Carbonite for servers starts off with 250GB of space and goes to 500GB and then up. The mixed service delivers a local appliance that the server is backed up to along with backing the drive to Carbonite's data center. Within the mixed scenario Carbonite provides and maintains the appliance for any fee every month. Setup for either their pure cloud backup or the mixed backup is simple, the primary setup only takes a short while. Carbonite's backup runs within the background, so businesses usually do not even notice it on the network in any way.
If you are only backing up locally, or not at all, it is highly advisable to look at a mixed strategy so that your business is covered no matter what the nature of the failure, in conclusion. This plan will position your servers along with your business for sustainability and continuity.