It's been standard practice for years for companies to backup to tape and send the tapes to a fireproof storage facility. But if that tape storage facility is nearby, all that data may be no safer than if it were kept in-house: What if a disaster destroys both the office and the storage facility?
That's where remote data backup comes in. By providing remote data backup services and technologies to your customers you're enabling data backups to a distant location over a high-throughput Internet data transmission at a reasonable cost.
Remote data backup services are ideal for customers whose facilities are only located in one geographical area. If they have additional branches or remote offices, servers could be allocated in one office and backed up at another.
Remote data backup services may also be appealing to customers who simply don't want to -- or aren't able to -- perform their own backups because they don't have skilled IT professionals at each site.
These services must be continually monitored to ensure backups are completed. You may also add extra protection by hosting extremely secure facilities with redundant power and connections to Internet service providers.
This original version of this tip appeared on SearchDataCenter.com.
About the author: David B. Jacobs has more than 20 years of networking industry experience. He has managed leading-edge software development projects and consulted to Fortune 500 companies, as well as software startups.