We are truly living in the digital age. Many organizations and some individuals have made the move towards being totally paperless. There are many ways being paperless is advantageous. First, it is good for the environment. Less paper means more trees are spared, it takes about 100 years for many trees to reach full size, and less waste means less of a negative environmental impact. While these are great reasons to go paperless, most business make the move for more self-serving reasons.
Paper Storage vs Digital Storage
Eliminating paper means a company does not have to store tons of paper files, which requires a lot of office space. The storage moves from physical filing cabinets and warehouses to digital options like onsite hard drives and cloud storage providers. However, there are issues with moving away from paper storage. The main issue is securing the data. When you store files digitally, it is essential that you back them up to prevent any loss of data. A good data backup plan includes an offsite storage solution. This is an important security measure because a disaster like a fire or flood onsite, can ruin your data. There is also the threat of a man-made disaster such as hackers or an error by the IT staff, which can cause data to be lost.
Ways To Store Data
In the past data was stored off site in a process known as data vaulting. Removable media such as tape or optical storage devices were physically transported or electronically uploaded to the offsite storage vaults. This was an expensive way to store data. These days many companies use the cloud for storage. The cloud is more economical and much easier to use. Data is uploaded and stored to an offsite location and accessible from any location. Even if you store your info in the cloud you have to have a regular backup schedule. You should also store in a redundant manner in separate spaces. Your cloud storage provider should already use a redundancy method of storing your data. Redundancy simply means replicating. Many actually replicate data three times. This may seem like overkill but in the event of an outage on your primary storage device, you will have more than one backup device with duplicate data. Cloud storage is the best and least expensive storage option for corporations and individuals. But even if you use another method of storing backups it is essential to have some type of backup solution. Things happen, systems fail, power outages occur and physical disks eventually stop working. Backing up data is essential in an onsite or cloud computing environment.
