Three Strategies to Synchronize, Backup and Protect Your Business Data

Virtually every type of company generates valuable data that must be updated, retained and safeguarded, including ‘secret sauce’ information on company products, employee data and sensitive customer information. As a company leader, it’s your responsibility to create and implement a strategy to make sure your information is synced to enable collaboration, backed up to ensure retention and secured to make sure data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

If your company started out small, it may have seemed easy at first to manage your data. Maybe you saved it all on a server, and only a few employees had access to it, so you felt you could keep an eye on it easily. But as companies grow, they get more complex. And these days, more and more businesses store information on the cloud so they can scale their infrastructure as they expand and enable employees to access data on the road or from multiple locations.

Syncing data is critical if you want to make sure everyone has access to up-to-date information, which is especially important for companies that manage mobile workforces. Otherwise, you’ll end up with different versions of the sales data or data silos will develop on separate hard drives that result in only certain employees having access to information that everyone needs.

Synchronization needs to encompass all types of devices, including tablets and mobile phones, laptops, desktops, servers and external drives. The type of data sync approach your company should pursue depends on your unique business needs, your workforce and your technology assets. Broadly speaking, there are three different categories of data solutions to choose from; here’s a brief overview of each:[wcm_restrict]

Enterprise workstation solution: With an enterprise workstation solution, your IT team can easily backup and sync files from workstations to a destination of your choice. You can configure the solution to synchronize multiple workstations to one another or to a cloud storage site to facilitate collaboration.

If you’re interested in this type of solution, make sure the provider allows rapid data syncing on and off the cloud and operates in multiple environments. You’ll also want to be sure the system features an effective user interface and can be deployed without disrupting your users’ workflow.
Enterprise server solution: A well-designed enterprise server solution enables companies to keep server files current while improving data access. A sync solution that integrates users via Group Policy and Active Directory streamlines administrative workloads while allowing rapid data access. It’s also important to make sure the solution allows storage of files in native formats for quick search and recovery.

An enterprise server solution should make it simple to handle sync size and bandwidth usage issues with block-level Delta synchronization. It should also enable collaboration via a location that allows syncing of numerous workstations to support sharing documents, and it should provide recovery points to enable data replication at other server sites while maintaining Windows permissions and settings to preserve security safeguards.
Management console solution: This option allows you to manage backup, synchronization and security from a central web interface. It’s a great alternative if you need to grant administrator access and oversee user activities across multiple locations. A good management console solution can streamline creation and distribution of sync jobs with grouping functions and enhance analytics with reporting tools.

With an effective management console solution, IT professionals can distribute and run jobs without affecting user activities, and no user training is required. A robust solution will also identify issues and automatically send alerts so that IT will be aware of any problems that occur during data syncs. A system that accepts a range of authentication methods and provides IT with reporting and management tools is ideal.

These days, business operations revolve around data to a greater extent than ever before, so finding a solution that allows you to synchronize, backup and protect company information can help you improve your competitive position. Given the realities of the highly mobile workforce, it’s important to find a solution that enables syncing across multiple devices and infrastructures, including the cloud, desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

To choose the right solution for your business, take a look at your unique needs, your workforce configuration and your advanced analytics and control requirements. Once you have a clear picture of what you need from a data synchronization, backup and protection solution, you can choose one that best fits your company’s style and start using data to your best advantage.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Bill Carey is Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Siber Systems Inc., which offers the top-rated RoboForm Password Manager software.