Taken from PC World Magazine, April 2011 Edition

Everyone knows that storing records safely in more than once place protects a business, but many companies fail to establish backup systems that will keep them running if disaster strikes.

Unfortunately, it often takes a crisis – such as a natural disaster, a theft, or a system failure – to prompt a business to act.  But realizing that you need a new storage strategy can come more gradually.  Very small companies may be unprepared for success, relying on backup products that work well for individual c0nsumers but can’t adjust as several months’ or years’ worth of records pile up.

Many small and midsize companies are abandoning tapes or hard-disk consumer systems in favour of appliances that attach to a local network and beyond; others are adopting cloud-based services.

Before you change your backup strategy, step back and create a plan.  Start by determining how much data you need to access: How many applications, e-mail records, files, databases, and machines are you dealing with?

Backup systems ideally run in the background without much human effort and let you restore data to specific points in time.  Look for backup behind a backup systems, such as a disk-to-disk-to-cloud setup, composed of Web-based storage tied to hardware in more than one location.  And make sure that a cloud-storage service has redundant servers in different geographic locations.

Many small businesses are finding that network-attached storage boxes – whether off the shelf or customized by an IT pro – fit their budget and are compact enough to sit on a desk.  The main benefit of going NAS is that it will be much faster for data restores.

Purely cloud-based storage often appeals to small businesses with limited IT support, as it requires only uploading data from your local machines directly to faraway servers that the provider hosts.  However, moving data across an Internet connection can be slow.

When choosing a backup provider, look for signs that it will exist for years to come, and ask what would happen if it were to fold.  What level of service can it guarantee?  Does the provider promise a specific data-recovery time, or pledge that your data will be available whenever you demand it?  If you don’t use the service for some time, might the company cancel your account?  Will your data be lumped in with other records?  How does the service ensure privacy?

For a 14-day free trial of ICS’s cloud-based online backup system, click here.