# Enterprise network backup
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Enterprise Network Backup Challenges

Enterprise network backup is an essential core activity in any small to medium businesses, not to mention larger corporations that are bound to deploy enterprise backup systems by law. Even though this activity is hidden from the outer world and stays unnoticed for most of its time in the internal workflow, enterprise network backup defines success of the business. One thing SMB must realize while maintaining its corporate backup policy is that their backup solution must be as flexible as possible and, further, hardware independent from one particular backup service provider. Such statement gains even more weight during this unstable recession period.

You must keep in mind that enterprise backup requires much more advanced backup solutions than those that suffice for personal backup needs. Enterprise backup in every single case presupposes support for You must keep in mind that enterprise backup requires much more advanced backup solutions than those that suffice for personal backup needs. Enterprise backup in every single case presupposes support for enterprise server backup. The server is the hub, informational headquarters of any company, that keeps all its data. This data is mission-critical to businesses and must be allowed to restore within RTO (Recovery Time Objective) applied in this business. The RTO issue is closely connected with another backup challenge that many SMB face, and that is ever increasing volumes of data accumulated at a blazing speed. This is sequence is bound to the retention time policy. As long as the enterprise backup software package employed by the company stays hardware independent all t0hese issues are quite easy to tackle.

Enterprise backup also presupposes backing up of particular type of data. First of all it is of course all sorts of databases: from MSSQL to FoxPro databases. Again, the business should feel completely free to flee from one system to the other without the necessity to swap currently utilized enterprise backup solution. And it is for granted that such backup packages are to cover MS Exchange Server, Lotus Notes database, and other well-known systems based around ODBC standard.

It's more or less obvious that SMB are reluctant to employ a big team of backup engineers and a single backup specialist in a 50 or fewer sized business is not a rare case at all. Therefore there is a clear-cut requirement for automation of all backup procedures in the enterprise environment, when individual employees do not have to address this problem themselves, and don't even need to know about backup policy existence. As a result companies usually employ client-server based backup solutions when a single server back ups data from all networked computers automatically during specified beforehand backup windows.

It is important that the employed backup package backups not only data from networked peer stations but also back ups the data on the server itself. In this case the solution should support distributed storage structure across enterprise network when backup information can be mirrored in different storage vaults. It is a surprise that these challenges that many SMB have to face for successful enterprise network backup can be adequately addressed by certain Enterprise-tailored backup utilities. Yet this is a fact, and many companies do rely on stand-alone backup software packages that have been specially enhanced to meet their specific needs.