Finding a good managed service provider for offsite data storage is one of the most critical decisions a business can make. Consider the intrinsic value of the data that makes your business run – you’ve got client information, valuable files and archived information, photos, contracts, financial data, tax records – you get the picture.  Now – consider what would happen to the digital wealth that you have managed to amass, in the event of a single catastrophe.  Fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, virus or worm, or even a simple case of water cooler mismanagement (its happened) or a more commonly overlooked occurrence, robbery and vandalism.  All it takes to destroy years of valuable data is a single event, and there you are, out in the cold without even an Outlook “To Do” list spared.   A scenario like this is enough to lose sleep over.

The good news is that these nightmares are avoidable, with affordable and significantly less effort than you might imagine.  Managed service providers specializing in offsite data storage have the capability to bring military grade data protection to every sort of business imaginable.  Not only have they created multiple data centers, they store multiple copies of every piece of data in each data center!  The data centers are located thousands of miles apart, so even if one of the data centers succumbs to a disaster, there is always another backup.

Even more amazing is the fact that managed service providers today have created their offsite data storage facilities to be compatible with a myriad of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac and more.  It supports every type of file.

Are you worried about data security?  Along with military grade redundancy in offsite data storage facilities, managed service providers have enabled military grade encryption such as Blowfish’s 448 bit symmetric block cipher, which has incidentally never been cracked or compromised in any way.  The software and tools are provided to the customer, who then creates the encryption password and has the only authority to it – the managed service provider does not have “back door” access to your confidential information.   Whether you are concerned about personal or patient data, or scores of credit card and debit card numbers, you have the ability to control access to them with the services provided by high quality offsite data storage facilities.

Backing up information the old-fashioned way can take hours upon hours, which translates to lost productivity.  While it is true that the first back up of information onto an offsite, data storage facility will take some time, subsequent backups will take less time.

Overall, the speed of backup depends on the speed of your internet service provider.  In the event there is so much information to back up, that a remote backup will be crippling, managed service providers have the capability to ship an external hard drive for the initial backup, which can then be shipped back to them for storage.

If there is one pre-caution you can take to protect your business, take the right one by finding a good managed service provider to provide the most secure offsite data storage.

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