Backup Solutions: A buyers' guide to choosing the right one.

The three key questions to consider when designing a backup solution that properly aligns to your organization are:

Consider a hospital which can’t afford to lose any patient data. It’d be advisable for this organization to invest heavily in a backup/disaster recovery solution that takes data snapshots every second and ensures that less than one second’s worth of information will be lost in the case of a system failure. On the other hand, a small professional services firm may deem it acceptable if backups are only taken in hourly increments, the reason being it is unlikely the business would be in jeopardy if only one hour of data input was lost.

It is important to note that all data being backed up doesn’t need to be treated equally and it is common practice for organizations to tier data based on critical business needs. Consider a manufacturer utilizing an ERP that is used by the finance, customer service and production departments. If hours of ERP data is lost, the company becomes vulnerable to devastating financial errors and delays in product deliverables. The servers hosting ERP data should be backed up in 15-minute increments (at a minimum) to ensure most of the data lost can be re-entered by users. On the other hand, consider this manufacturer’s sales department that uses a CRM system for entering new opportunities and tracking activities. If the sales department were to lose one day’s worth of CRM data, this inconvenience is unlikely to place devastating amounts of stress on the business as a whole. Running CRM backups once or twice per day should suffice.

Consider law firms that are only able to work and bill their clients when they have access to their client data. It is advisable for law firms to invest in a virtualized backup server that can be configured within hours to accommodate the majority of the law firm’s workloads in the case of a production server failure.