Data storage and backup are critical to any organization's IT infrastructure. Just having a large, external drive attached to your office server isn't enough. While drive reliability has gone up, and costs have gone down, local (in your office) external storage is still subject to the weird and unexpected. Disks still crash, data is still corrupted and systems can be hacked. Worse, your office could be flooded (recall Tropical Storm Sandy) or you could be hit with a fire in your building. With more and more of your business being run on software, you need to make absolutely sure you have multiple, redundant backup stored at different locations. We not only backup all our web servers and data servers fully at our data center, but we also backup EVERYTHING to the cloud with Amazon S3.
There are great backup services out there like Mozy and Carbonite. They are easy, fairly inexpensive and reliable. But for this post, I am focussing on Amazon S3.
