The third-party backup solutions offered for e-mail servers are insufficient and don’t suit the needs of many organizations. They provide manual features and fall short in terms of backup and recovery capabilities.
Without a proper backup strategy, companies are at risk of data loss due to human errors, disasters, and security breaches. This could not only lead to a lost opportunity but also to possible legal ramifications. This can cause unwanted data access, denial of service, regulatory penalties, and financial losses.
Email Server Backup Solutions Explained
A backup of a server is often created in order to be able to restore data if the original server crashes or becomes inaccessible. This is especially important in organizations for legal or business reasons.
The process of backups is done by making an exact copy of the server’s data storage device in order to prevent data loss. This operation can be done manually by copying all files onto an external storage device. This can be also done automatically by setting up a scheduled process.
The backup process is much more complex in action. It requires a lot of time, expertise, and caution to be successful. There are different factors a system administrator should take into account in order not to lose any data, especially when it’s done manually.
Challenges
As we said, backup solutions are not just about replicating data. It involves procedures that should be followed to ensure that your data is safe and secure. For instance, backing up data frequently to include the latest data added to the system, verifying the validity of backed-up data after creation, preventing data corruption, making sure the backup data is stored in a safe place, and so on.
With these complexities and the huge need for backup solutions, it’s no surprise that third-party solutions are successfully taking on a large share of the market. However good a third-party solution is, it is not necessarily designed for your infrastructure and platform, so these solutions would be most effective if you take extra precautions to avoid any issues with the service you get.
It’s important to note that a third-party solution may not be designed for your specific infrastructure or platform and it wouldn’t have the specific configuration you may need. Therefore for these solutions to be most effective you should take extra precautions to avoid any issues with the service you get.
This is why a backup system that is integrated into the platform you’re using is always the most reliable solution. Not only it is tailored to your platform, but it is also designed by developers who created the platform. It provides system administrators peace of mind as it takes less time to set up and is easier to maintain.
Why Zextras Carbonio Is the Solution?
Zextras Carbonio is an e-mail server and full-featured collaboration platform for large-scale organizations in need of a digital workplace. Zextras Carbonio offers an integrated backup system for organizations to assure the security of their data. With the integrated backup system, data is backed up in real time and can be restored quickly to ensure that productivity isn’t impacted.
Zextras Carbonio comes with its real-time backup, restore, and disaster recovery system that is integrated into the software. It guarantees a more reliable service as it’s tailor-made to your platform.
Important Requirements of a Backup System for E-mail Servers
Here are 4 essential factors every backup system should have when it comes to e-mail servers:
- Real-time
- Disaster recovery plan
- Ease of use
- Performance
Let’s dissect each characteristic and see how Zextras Carbonio achieves them.
Importance of a “Real-time” Backup
In this day and age, it is crucial for organizations to back up their infrastructure data. The importance of real-time backup is that it makes sure that there is always a copy of your data that includes even the most recent changes in the event of a failure. Backup files are created automatically, therefore system administrators don’t need to wait for the process to finish in order to continue working with the system.
Moreover, the traditional method of backing up is to shut down the system and back up all data on tapes or disks. This process can take hours and will certainly affect the user experience. With real-time backup, organizations can back up their data without any negative impact on the user experience and without any system downtime. It is an effective way to keep data safe from loss or corruption in case of a disaster.
Disaster Recovery
Disasters can happen at any time. It is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place to avoid data loss and downtime due to natural disasters.
In the event of a disaster like an earthquake or flood, one of the worst things that can happen is when both your primary and backup servers get damaged. Let’s say you store your backups in the same building and room as your primary server.
Luckily with Zextras Carbonio, you can use an off-site storage device to store backup which will let you restore all your data even if the whole infrastructure is irreparably damaged. Off-site backups can provide protection against all of these risks.
Ease of Use
We have all experienced deleting important e-mails that you might need again while cleaning up unimportant messages e-mails. In most cases you can restore those from the trash folder, but what if you haven’t noticed that you also put some important e-mails in the trash? What if you cleared the trash before realizing that you deleted those?
Obviously, you can go to your system administrator and ask them to restore that specific item for you. Although the process appears to be negligible in terms of time, many system administrators believe that it takes a significant amount of their time since these occur so frequently. The reason is in so many cases restoring a single item using your backup system, requires the whole system to be restored. Therefore It’s vital to have a backup system that is easy to use and effective which makes it easy for system administrators to operate.
Zextras Carbonio backup, for instance, allows system administrators to retrieve the deleted items at a time interval easily and save a lot of time as there is no need for restoring the whole system.
Performance
As we’ve discussed, it’s important to have a backup that’s always on in the background. This will help ensure your data stays safe. As a result, it is critical that these procedures run smoothly and efficiently without requiring a lot of processing power.
Here are a few reasons why Zextras Carbonio is one of the most efficient back-ups and restore systems:
- Optimized operation – By deduplicating and parallelizing the backup operations thanks to an internal scheduler that keeps track of all changes in the mailbox and puts the operations into a queue with an ultra-light memory structure to be scheduled, deduplicated, and optimized.
- Optimized components – By improving internal components to better suit the platform to optimize CPU and memory usage.
- Multicore architecture – By leveraging the power of multi-threading to better optimize the processing power where system administrators can choose the number of threads to be used in the process.
Conclusion
No matter how cautious you may be, there is always the risk of losing data when it comes to your business. To ensure the safety of your e-mails, files, and your business, you need to have a failsafe strategy.
Here are some tips when choosing your e-mail and collaboration platform to create a digital workplace for your business:
- Pay attention that an integrated backup system is always preferred over third-party solutions,
- Make sure that you back up all of the important data on a regular basis relying on a real-time backup plan,
- Off-site backups are a good way to protect your data from natural disasters,
- The amount of time and effort required to implement the backup plan,
- Lastly, if the backup system is optimized to work in your environment for better performance.
Zextras Carbonio comes with a built-in backup system and disaster recovery, which can help to secure your data and have it ready for restoration in the event of a failure. Carbonio’s real-time backup system ensures you can recover your data from any point in time.