Third-party backups are essential, even if you use Google Vault

Archiving data and backing it up are actually two different functions with a few key differences. Just as you might wonder why Damson Cloud technicians recommend combining Dropbox for Business with the Office 365 suite, you might also question how we justify integrating Backupify with G Suite.

Google Vault is a G Suite app for creating reliable copies of your most valuable data, and although it may be a convenient in-the-family solution, this platform is best suited for a specific purpose that has very little to do with disaster recovery.

So, I don’t need Google Vault?

You do, but not as a means to prevent data loss from man made and natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and fires. Instead, Vault should be deployed for archiving data in accordance with regulatory guidelines for legally mandated industries.

Those regulations include retaining untouched documents for certain periods of time, robust e-discovery functionality, and activity auditing, all of which prove your records haven’t been tampered with if they’re needed in the courtroom.

It’s a great service that we recommend to several of our legal and medical clients, but it’s also a solution we almost always manage for them. It’s complex and users shouldn’t be granted Vault permissions without thorough training.

In short, instead of frequently migrating everything to quarantined cloud storage, Google Vault focuses on keeping users from deleting or modifying legally relevant company data. Storing data for the sake of disaster recovery planning requires a different mindset and solution entirely.

What does Backupify do that Vault doesn’t?

Backup solutions shift their priorities to accommodate the most crucial tenets of data recovery: recovery time and recovery point. Take the former, if your business needs to respond to a data audit or subpoena, Vault can export all the necessary information in an acceptable amount of time, but only because the pressure of lost business and downtime isn’t looming over you!

By approaching the restoration process in an innovative way, Backupify is able to cut down the number of steps in disaster recovery processes without any detriment to your data. For example, data archived in Vault needs to be restructured manually or exported, and then imported back into your Google apps with third-party software to restore its original architecture.

Instead of worrying about the minutiae of file system structuring, Backupify restores G Suite and Office 365 data as swiftly as possible.

Also, as reliable as Google’s cloud infrastructure may be, using its in-house solution means your data is still technically only stored in one place. There are few sins as egregious as single-location backups.

Records vs documents: a critical distinction

The second reason Backupify is a no-brainer for G Suite companies is because records are finished data, whereas documents are works in progress. When it comes to compliance, retaining records is often more important than documents.

Think about this in the context of ransomware. When archiving solutions, prioritise records; they can easily justify scanning your Drive for new data once a day, possibly even once every other day. How much data would you lose if you suffered downtime during business hours? How much would it be worth to your organisation?

Backupify automatically creates redundant copies of your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Contacts, and Sites data three times a day. And because it’s such a user-friendly platform, we recommend granting employees access so they can manually trigger backups as often as necessary. The dashboard looks just like your G Suite applications and virtually no onboarding is necessary.

What Damson Cloud blog post would be complete without a note on cost savings?

Finally, regardless of whether you’re archiving data for compliance purposes or backing up information for disaster recovery, Vault requires you to suspend users that have left the company (rather than delete them) to retain their data.

Most document retention periods are at least three years, which means paying hundreds of dollars to keep accounts on the roster that you don’t need. Backupify totally eliminates that requirement by allowing you to archive inactive users and their data at a fraction of the cost.

Between the industry-leading reliability, affordability, and long list of features, there are plenty of reasons to start using Vault at your organisation. However, with the help of Damson’s cloud technicians, Backupify can handle both your archiving and your backup needs in a non-Google cloud environment for less money than can G Suite’s in-house alternative. When it comes to disaster recovery, every minute counts -- message us about Backupify now!