This is part of Symform’s ongoing series of Online Data Backup Best Practices. Today, we are looking at Remote Devices. But let’s start with a quick definition and description to avoid confusion.
Remote Devices include laptop and desktop devices that are remote from your IT infrastructure. They may rarely be using your network resources and probably don’t have the benefit of local backup. These devices are used by your remote sales, service and support team members. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (either company issued or Bring Your Own Device) are increasingly part of the population of remote devices.
Because these devices are not frequently connected to your network, online data backup is a great way to protect the data on those devices and keep your remote workforce productive. Your remote workforce is often in customer facing roles, so online data backup can help preserve customer relationships and your revenues.
Online data backup allows your remote devices to get backed up to your selected cloud storage and backup service. There are several key attributes of online data backup services that you should particularly look for and make sure that you use with your remote devices.
Top 4 Quality Attributes of Online Data Backup
- Automated backup – Your remote teams should not have to cope with scheduled backups. Automated online data backup can keep the backup processes chugging along whenever the device is online
- Auto-restart the backup – This capability means your remote workforce can be as mobile as they need to be and have their online data backup restart when they are back online. Requiring manual restarts will lead to failure.
- Monitoring and Alerting– You need to know when a device has not been getting backed up. This could be from an extended period of being offline or from bandwidth not being adequate for the initial data seed or ongoing growth in data on the remote device. See Online Data Backup Best Practice 1: Mind the Upload Gap for more details on the critical role of bandwidth in online data backup.
- Automatic updating of online data backup software- Here is another area where you should avoid relying on the fallible human element. Make sure your remote devices are getting automatic updates of the online data backup software.
Remote devices, because of their environments, users and data present a different set of challenges than do devices that are always on and always on the network. Online data backup of remote devices can uniquely manage the risk of data loss to your business.
Definitely agree, offsite backup should be considered as a form of insurance for your business. Imagine losing all your business critical data.