A colleague of mine commented on something I found rather interesting recently. He was referring to an online IT course still referring to optical drives and stated that the technology is dated, that he hasn’t used discs in a very long time and asked the question “who does?”. Well, I pointed out that it is still strongly in use as a backup media and that Facebook recently used 10,000 Blu-ray discs for a low power storage system. What I want to discuss below is the key areas in this type of storage known as local storage and the popular cloud-based storage for backing up in business regardless of size.
Local Storage
Local storage can be considered a nice easy and cheap way to backup your files. This could be using a thumb drive or to some DVD/Blu-ray discs then storing it away offsite for safe keeping meaning if something went wrong in the office, the data could be recovered from these media. The data is also in your control, meaning you are the person that can determine where the data is held, and are responsible for the security of it, such as who has access to it, password protection and encryption etc.
Unfortunately the downside to this is that some people take local storage quite literally and store the backup perhaps too local to hand thus meaning that if something went wrong in the office, say a fire, then your original copy of the data stored on your device and the local backup can possibly be lost together.
Cloud Storage
Having your company data easily accessible from the one location can provide really productive advantages, especially to the ever expanding Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend where users can access their work data any time from their devices and even collaborate documents allowing many other co-workers working from anywhere to collaborate on the work file(s) too. It is however a bit more expensive as your data is uploaded through the internet and is stored on a remote server held by the cloud company. There are free options available such as a free 15mb from Google Drive. However, these are more favorable for personal usage and can come with less secure storage than is available on the premium/business services.
On the other hand, businesses must realise that the cloud companies are not immune to data loss, or even data theft, from skilled hackers targeting that said company. This means there is a always the possibility with cloud storage that you do not have total control of the data as compared to local storage. With users accessing the data from their portable devices this can also present a security risk with smartphone software being targeted increasingly by hackers. A lot of the time much less security is implemented by users on the device compared to a laptop, which in a workplace or at home, should be password protected and should have anti-virus software etc. installed if dealing with sensitive data.
Overview
Both types of storage have their pros and cons but to avoid the cons in both, some good advice I came across recently is to choose a cloud storage facility that provides redundancy, a high percentage of guaranteed uptime and robust security. Augment your cloud backups with local physical backups to ensure that, even if there’s a disaster, you’ll always have the necessary information available.
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