Backing Up the Back-Up: Redundant Redundancy Keeps Your Data Safe

Backups Are Essential If You Care About Protecting Your Data, But Don’t Dou Also Need To Share It With Others?

Want to make an IT professional tremble in their boots? Look them straight in the eye and say, “SPOFF!”

You’ve just named one of their worst nightmares. SPOFF is an acronym that stands for “Single Point Of Failure.” This is a horrible thing. It prevents continuity of service for a company. The safety net of a backup alone provides no immediate solution. It’s redundancy you want—and that’s different. Here’s what you need to know.

Backups And Redundancy, What’s The Difference?
Why Redundancy Is What You Really Want
More Than Multiple Copies Of Your Data

Backups And Redundancy, What’s The Difference?

Magnitudes. The irony is that redundancy is often confused with backups. They may be similar, but they have different purposes.

Backups create copies of your data in the case of some catastrophic event.
Redundancy goes beyond data storage. It ensures continuity of service in a catastrophic event by storing data in multiple, disparate locations. It refers to your data and your ability to continue to operate when your primary location is incapable of doing so.

Why Redundancy Is What You Really Want

Redundancy starts with your data. That’s your company’s lifeblood. The National Archives and Records Administration reports that 93% of all companies that lose access to their data for more than 10 days will be out of business within a year.

Data is so valuable that having a copy of it isn’t enough. It must be made redundant. Yes, that means backups of your backups—that data has to be available elsewhere other than on-premises.

That’s what makes the cloud a champion solution for creating an off-premises backup of your data. It allows you to resume operations using your data from a different location immediately. Voila, continuity!

More Than Multiple Copies Of Your Data

Data doesn’t just live on a hard drive. It’s shared between your employees, customers, and other companies. Your data’s ability to be shared is the second reason why backups aren’t sufficient. A truly redundant solution goes beyond creating multiple copies of your data in multiple places. It also makes sure that you’re able to keep that data flowing if something happens to your primary network.

Network redundancy guards against prolonged periods of downtime by having alternative data distribution methods at the ready. Because what good is a backup of your data sitting on a server with no network connectivity?

This brings us back to SPOFF. Just about every business understands the importance of backing up their data. Most companies now realize that a single backup of that data doesn’t guarantee what’s more important—the ability to continue to do business. For that, you need both data redundancy, as well as alternate network connectivity. Otherwise, you still have a single point of failure. You have nothing to rely on should it fail.

And in today’s world, failure isn’t an option.

Cloud computing makes this type of failure less likely. It’s possible—especially if you use an I.T. managed services provider—to reach a point where you have no hardware other than your computers and printers on-premises. All the more reason to make sure your network isn’t that Achilles Heel, also known as SPOFF.

Data backup and redundancy is a full-time concern. Successful companies, both big and small, turn that responsibility over to their IT managed services provider. These professionals take on the responsibility of ensuring crucial data backup services and threat surveillance and instituting redundancy plans that sustain service continuity. If they do their job, your business won’t ever “go down.”