An increasing number of companies are offering online back-up and restore as a service but small businesses have been warned to think carefully about who they entrust their sensitive data to.
While Irish-based companies, including Servecentric, Hosting 365 and Eircom Total ICT, offer online back-up and restore on their own infrastructure, there have been suggestions that many companies are reselling services that could be based on servers in the US or other territories.
“They don’t own the infrastructure themselves,” said Jason O’Conaill, sales and marketing director at Servecentric. “You need a reliable provider with resources on the ground in Ireland to go that extra mile to help you recover data,” he argued.
Hosting 365 marketing manager Ed Byrne suggested that online back-up and restore was “very easy to offer” but some companies were doing so at “ridiculous prices and ridiculous amounts of storage. You should be wary of a company you don’t know”.
Byrne and O’Conaill suggested smaller companies should be selective about what data they chose to back up. “Backing up is expensive so there’s no point in backing up data unless you need to,” said O’Conaill. “You need to select the files and partitions in the network that need to be backed up,”
Byrne believed a big benefit from online back-up and restore in the near term was the ability to make data accessible from anywhere. “It gives you online file access and you can keep all your documents synchronised. You can back up all your work documents and emails. That’s where I see the value. It might make more difference to the people in a business than to the business itself.”
The consensus was that the service was a useful add-on for customers rather than a viable standalone business. “It’s easier to sell to customers we already have,” Byrne said.
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