As with any part of your information systems, integrating offsite storage into your infrastructure requires planning. Although it may seem intimidating for smaller businesses, the planning process does not have to be overwhelming. It is, however, important. Remember, the reason you are implementing offsite storage is to protect your most vital corporate data from disaster. A disaster can be something as major as an earthquake and as minor as accidental deletion of critical files.

For the planning process, work closely with your IT staff or consulting firm. The information on this website is not meant to be comprehensive, however, these are a few of the basic items you should address during the planning process.

Review current policies, procedures and operations.

1. The business objective. Take a few moments to write up a simple sentence or paragraph regarding why you are implementing offsite storage. Keep this in mind while planning.
   
2. Review existing data retention operation.? Is the backup system working as expected? Can you recover data from existing backups? Are there new systems or new sets of critical business data that are not incorporated into your existing backup procedures? Is inappropriate data being backed up? In the last several years various litigation and court cases have made it clear that there is liability in retaining data that you do not really need or want.
3. Briefly reassess data retention policies. With the Offsite Storage business objective in mind, look at your business and it's data, and identify the mission critical sections of data you need to retain. Decide what portion (or all of it) should be securely stored offsite.
4. Briefly reassess existing data retention procedures. As with most information technology systems, failure points tend to be human error. If your existing backup procedures require manual intervention (somebody has to click 'okay', or physically rotate a tape drive), this is a plausible fail point. You want your backup systems fully automated so they run smoothly and securely. The only manual process involved should be an annual or semi-annual data recovery test to ensure backed up data is recoverable in case of disaster.
   
5. Locate and adjust any issues with your poliices and procedures.? If you have found problems, inconsistencies or weakness in your system, then STOP HERE. Implementing offsite storage to replicate backup systems that are not 100% functional will only propogate the problem.

Are your systems Offsite Storage ready?

1. Is the data centralized? Your data must be centralized on a backup server in your office and the data must be accessible (either from the backup server itself, or from another dedicated gateway) to be pushed 'out' to the offsite storage system.
2. Is there enough server capacity(CPU, memory and disk space)? The backup server(s) capacity needs to be adequate for current and future needs. If disk space is limited, install those extra drives because corporate data tends to grow at exponential rates. You don't want to find out in six months or a year that your backup systems are failing because of insufficient disk space.
3. How will your 'gateway' to the offsite storage system work? Closely review security policies regarding how the server connects to the Internet and accesses the backup data. For smaller companies, a single backup server, properly secured behind a firewall and on NAT is generally adequate protection. Larger companies may find this inadequate.

You are ready to implement offsite storage.

1. Which Offsite Storage Package? Keeping your policies in mind decide which Offsite Storage package is appropriate for your needs.
   
2. How many units of Storage do you need? Determine the total volume of the data you need archived to Offsite Storage and review our guidelines on bandwidth and capacity planning.