SMB’s recognize online data backup as a necessity
A growing number of small- and medium-sized businesses around the nation are beginning to recognize online data backup as necessary rather than discretionary expenses. Increasingly, such businesses see data recovery as a critical need of the organization and regard online backup and recovery options as the most viable and affordable means of assuring that needed data will be available for daily workflow even when unforeseen events interfere with the regular operation of the business. This trend, however, is nothing new; as far back as 2009, over 40% of SMBs were citing automated methods of data recovery from backups as a crucial IT need.
Barriers to adoption
Even though the need for automated online backup is apparent to even the smallest of businesses these days, not all SMBs have yet adopted the technology. A variety of barriers to adoption exist, but when SMBs are polled, two factors stand out above the others: security and cost.
Cost considerations
A common approach of small businesses to online backup is to assume that this technology is only affordable for the big players in the market. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. Many online backup suppliers actually price their services in ways that make them highly accessible to small businesses.
A popular model in this regard is the pay-per-gigabyte approach, in which a business is assessed a variable charge during each payment cycle, with the charge directly reflecting the amount of bandwidth or storage actually consumed during the time period in question. Thus, a small business that needs only a relatively tiny amount of backup space can be sure that they are not paying for capacity that will ultimately go unused.
Security
In this context, data security concerns can actually be ironic; businesses that back up their data on site and store it on the premises are actually open to more data loss scenarios than those that utilize an online backup solution. A flood or fire in the office, for example, stands an excellent chance of destroying both primary data and all backups if data sets are stored in the same geographic location. In contrast, backing up data in the cloud, which is an integral part of online automated backup, guarantees that a localized event cannot destroy all copies of the data in question.
Learn more about the author Bob Martin
