With so many backup service providers on the market, how do you know if you will be selecting the right one for your business? Let’s face it, many businesses will select a backup service provider based on price alone. How do you know that you are getting the bang for your backup buck?

Your company needs a remote backup service that can deliver on its promises during a disaster recovery scenario. Remote backups can be orchestrated on various architectures such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V or bare metal servers. As you begin shopping for a remote backup service, keep these things in mind when it’s time to select an offsite backup provider.

Responsiveness

When you need a copy of your company’s data and you need it as soon as possible, what can you expect in terms of responsiveness from the vendor you are considering partnering with?

Ensure that your remote backup vendor is able to provide a clear cut service level agreement that dictates the turn around time needed in order to begin the data restore process.

Point to Point Data Encryption

Moving your company’s data across the public internet without any type of encryption is a good way to accidentally expose information about your business to nefarious third parties.

Most organizations have technical auditing standards in place that requires data to be encrypted both in transit and at rest. This ensures that your data stays safe and secure from unwanted third parties.

Annual DR Testing

One of the things you’ll want to coordinate with your remote backup service provider is an annual disaster recovery test.

Many backup service providers will allow you perform these tests so that your IT staff can feel good about its offsite backup infrastructure. Incase of a total loss at your headquarters, an offsite copy of your data will be critical for rebuilding your business.

Simplification of Backup Hardware and Software

Ask your backup service provider about the hardware and software used to conduct offsite backups.

Backups suites such as Veeam will backup and replicate virtual machines to remote locations, giving your business the ability to spin up a replica copy of your virtual infrastructure at a remote site should your onsite datacenter become unavailable.

This is just one of the many potential scenarios that would help your business solve it’s offsite backup issues. Best of all, remote backup services will help your business recovery rapidly during a disaster recovery scenario.

Talk to your backup service provider about ways to simplify the infrastructure used to create backups. For example, many businesses are ditching their tape backup devices and exclusively using private cloud backups to achieve their offsite backup goals. Others are replacing tapes with data backup appliances that sit in their data centers.

Rapid Resolutions to Data Backup Requests

If your organization hires a remote backup service, chances are that you won’t need to talk to them that much. Businesses rarely find themselves in a situation where they need to recover data but when they do, they often need help immediately.

These emergencies are best handled by technicians that also provide excellent customer service. Your backup service provider should be able to give you an update on the progress of your backup’s restore job. In fact, you may even ask if you are able to get regular reports on the health of your backups. This gives your organization the assurance that the backups are ready and available for your business in case of an emergency.

Your backup service provider should be able to help you get a copy of your disk within your service level agreement’s parameters. When your backup service provider can meet it’s goals, your business continue to operate during a disaster with minimal interruptions to your technical infrastructure. This allows you to continue to provide services to your clients and minimize any impact to overall operations.