Online backup also known as offsite backup or remote backup is a data protection service that enables your company to restore data regardless of disaster. Your business will have important data, which you cannot afford to lose stored on PC's, laptops or Servers. This can be file data such as word, excel documents or application data such as mail, financial or customer management data. If your company cannot survive without this data then you need an online data backup service. It will automatically carry out the complicated function of backing up your data to a remote storage environment whilst offering a simple method of management.

The concept of offsite or online backup is simple; you data residing on your server which you need to protect. The easiest and most secure way of doing this is to ensure your backup is move to a location as far away as possible from your offices. This will ensure, regardless of disaster, fire, flood, structural damage you can rest assured you will never lose any of your important data.

The backup process is automatically carried out when your business is closed, i.e. every night, but this can be controlled by you, you can backup every hour if required. All companies must make an initial full backup then thereafter will make nightly incremental backups. An incremental backup will only backup the changes made within your days trading. This is a great way of cutting down your backup windows and also offers multiple versions of your backup.

The concept of online backup is simple and the offerings from most companies are pretty much the same, so why can the monthly charges vary so much between suppliers? Easy answer, its all about software functionality and hardware infrastructure, for example, I could setup a company right now that offers remote backup solutions. I could buy a software license for a half decent backup product and build a cheap server and run it from my home. Not the best way to treat your company's most important asset.

Backup Software ? should be feature rich, offering volume shadow copy, in-file delta, one click restore processes as standard. All agents to backup all major applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL , Lotus, Oracle, MySQL should be included as standard. Support for all major operating system should also be included. Finally and the most important element to any online backup solution is security. Your data must be encrypted to levels used by the military prior to being transmitted via the internet.

Hardware Infrastructure ? should be totally resilient to failure, for example, the environment you are sending your data to must consist of many servers and many storage environments, so if one part of the system failed other parts will automatically pick up the work load. This infrastructure should also be replicated to a data storage facility preferably in a different country; all ensuring loss of your data is an impossibility.

In summary, companies who charge ?10 per month will probably have a server in their home; companies who charge ?50 per month will probably have ?500,000 of hardware located throughout Europe.