A different breed of online backup solutions from
Iron Mountain allows businesses to back up and
retrieve data via the Internet in a “set and forget”
format that eases the burden on users
while strengthening the security of corporate data.
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AuthorizAtion: With Iron Mountain’s online backup
solution, only those authorized by the customer
have access to the encryption key. Enterprise-grade
backup solutions are designed to help companies
meet their compliance objectives by demonstrating
consistency, security, chain-of-custody and best-faith efforts when needed.
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CentrAlized BACkup poliCy: By offering a centralized backup policy, online backup solutions designed
for enterprises remove the need for users to take
part in the backup process. If companies depend
on users to be proactive about backing up sensitive data, there’s a good chance that backups will
be forgotten or incomplete.
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VisiBility: Enterprise-level backup solutions offer
visibility into the organization’s backup history
and processes. The global reporting feature in
Iron Mountain’s online solution gives IT a holistic
view of what has been backed up, when and where.
“When you look at most of the consumer offerings,
they don’t do that,” says Su. “But in a company it’s
the IT department’s job to make sure data has been
backed up properly.”
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suCCessful dAtA retrieVAl: Some consumer-grade
solutions do not guarantee the retrieval of data,
which begs the question of why you are bothering
to back up the data in the first place. “That’s OK for
a consumer,” says Su. It’s annoying, but not life-threatening to lose a bunch of emails, your i Tunes
library and photos of your dog’s birthday party. But
the loss of corporate data can put a company on
a fast track to bankruptcy or a sullied reputation.
According to the National Archives and Records
Administration, 93 percent of companies that lost
their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed
for bankruptcy within one year.
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seCure dAtA Centers: Many vendors of consumer-grade services store the data in a single data center.
Again, that’s usually fine for individuals, because
the odds are that the data center will remain secure.
But for most businesses, even the smallest risk of
system downtime is too much. Iron Mountain has
redundant data centers and data sent to one site is
immediately replicated to the other site for full fail-over redundancy—backup for the backup.
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CApACity to grow: A corporation needs an online
backup solution that provides scalability as its
needs change. Many consumer-grade solutions are
not equipped to deal with changes in a business’s
needs. Likewise, new players have entered the online
backup market in recent years, but they can disappear just as quickly, especially in a volatile economy.
Iron Mountain has been around since 1951, serves
more than 100,000 corporate clients worldwide and
has been backing up data for companies of all sizes
for 15 years. “The financial stability and track record
of the vendor are critical,” says Su. If you choose a
vendor that might not be there in a year, then your
data might not accessible when you need it.
The shift toward online backup means that companies have an opportunity to change the way they think
about distributed data protection, making it possible
to protect their data like never before, ease the burden
on the users, and meet ever more stringent compliance
regulations. But the proliferation of solutions means IT
departments must treat this decision with care, considering the business’s needs, the compliance regulations
of the industry and the nature of the data as they decide
how to protect it, and the ability of the vendor to meet
those needs. ▲
MEG MOORE is a freelance technology writer based in
Massachusetts.
