The backup plan
If you’re in IT, you probably recoil when you hear the words “backup and recovery”. Not because you don’t believe in the necessity of these processes, but rather because they can involve hours upon hours of work, at the end of which you probably still don’t feel 100% comfortable with your business’s backup plan.
As corporate data continues to explode, companies are being faced with a scary truth: without data, there is no business. Which is precisely why it is so vital to create a modern, dependable system to safeguard priceless business information. Once again, cloud comes to the rescue, with cloud backup as well as recovery and restore options having emerged as secure, cost-effective and reliable solutions over the last decade.
Benefits of cloud backup
While I am aware that some are still sceptical about the security of the cloud, it is a very secure method of file transfer. Let’s take Microsoft’s Azure Backup as an example: The files that are chosen for backup are encrypted prior to transmission to the cloud and remain encrypted when they get there. There is only one decryption key, which resides with the customer, so information backed up like this is far safer than data sitting unencrypted in an on-site data backup and recovery system.
In addition, because a cloud backup, recovery and restore solution takes advantage of a business’s existing infrastructure, it enables the reduction of the total cost of ownership compared to the purchase and maintenance of complex tape backup systems.
Having a cloud backup solution also means improved reliability and speed of recovery because it instantly restores data regardless of your location. It also offers assurance of a backup schedule where company data is saved automatically. This provides an unobtrusive and transparent solution, resulting in less operational and administrative management for data backup.
Cloud backup allows for the redirection of IT resources within the business towards more pressing challenges or strategic initiatives, with the built-in scalability of cloud making it easy to evolve as your business data environment grows and changes.
You will still be responsible for the safety of your corporate and customer data when moving to a cloud backup, but using a provider with multiple data centres that are geographically diverse will give you a backup solution with more reliability and redundancy than tape backup.
With workforce mobility in full swing, it’s inevitable that employees will create and store corporate data on their endpoint devices, which is bad news for the security of your data. With cloud-based data protection solutions you can back up data to a central repository in the event that these devices are lost or stolen. They also give you data loss prevention such as geo-location and remote wipe capabilities that will allow you to find devices and erase data remotely if need be.
You are also assured that data born in SaaS-based applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps can be backed up and recovered, which traditional data protection solutions aren’t capable of.
Creating a solid cloud backup
Similar to myriad solutions in IT, not all cloud backups are created equal. What you need is a backup service that’s fast, efficient, very cost-effective, and that will bring an additional layer of disaster recovery protection to your organisation.
It should bring the best of cloud to your business, taking the responsibilities of storage, blobs, geographical redundancy and more out of the IT person’s hands, without costing a fortune or forfeiting some required level of functionality.
Source: EE Publishers
More on storage
SanDisk unveils the biggest SD card in the world
Loading ...