Every business, from the two-person, home-based concern to the multinational corporation, needs an effective backup plan to ensure adherence to local and federal laws and regulations and protect the company against data loss.

Small and Medium Businesses

If you’re a small business owner, you may not have an IT department to manage your network. Your network may be managed part-time by a technical employee, a consultant or an agency, or you may manage it yourself. No matter which option you currently use, assessing your needs and creating a backup plan is essential to the health of your business.

Edward Kumar, a Silicon Valley small business technology consultant, sums it up this way: “You have to ask yourself—‘If I lose this data, will I still be in business?’” When you’re planning a backup strategy, Kumar suggests that you ask yourself the following questions:

• How much data do you have? How fast is it growing?
• Is your industry or business legally required to store specific data? For how long?
• How much data can your company afford to lose?
• What storage medium should you use?
• How much time will your backup plan require? How much will it cost you in hourly salary and media costs?

Large Enterprises

Large enterprises have data centre employees and storage professionals who are responsible for keeping the company’s important data backed up and readily accessible. The biggest concern for large enterprises today is not whether or not to back up, but how to select the proper media for the business and also meet the storage requirements of current legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

Media Choices

Depending on the importance of the data, backup frequency may range from instantaneous to weekly. As part of the planning process, large enterprises must categorise their data and assign the appropriate backup frequency to each category. For instance, in most cases email can be backed up every 24 hours, while credit card data from an ecommerce site may require a fast RAID system that backs up transactions instantly.

More and more large enterprises are opting for hard drive-based solutions for their most important data—mission-critical data that needs to be recoverable and back online as soon as possible.

Data Storage Regulations

Government regulations, often designed to protect the consumer, dictate how some types of data must be stored and maintained. Probably the most far-reaching example of this type of regulation is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which regulates how financial data is maintained and reported. Since financial data creation and management is almost always done electronically, IT controls must be in place to maintain the integrity and security of financial data.

No matter the size of your business, having a well-planned data backup strategy is critical to protecting your company’s most vital business information.