If you’re not already backing up onto the cloud, why not? It’s easy, incredibly cost-effective and offers a range of other potential benefits.
One of the most welcome features of cloud backup is that it takes away many day-to-day IT chores, leaving your people to get on with more productive work. No need to back up onto tape, store the files in a fire vault or use an off-premises provider such as Iron Mountain, with all the time-consuming process that goes with it.
It is likely to cost less than these old methods too, and there’s less risk of accidentally deleting the wrong information while carrying out a backup.
Cloud fundamentally changes the way backups get done in entirely good ways.
With the infinite storage cloud offers, you can stream all your backup and site data to the cloud, you don’t need to plan the amount of space required and you have none of the integrity problems that come with tapes. Cloud backups also happen faster than manual tape backups.
Backups in the cloud mean you can implement longer-term storage solutions at lower costs, helping you stay on the right side of data compliance rules with greater ease.
Cloud backup options
While migrating applications to the cloud typically takes some planning, there are some amazingly simple options when it comes to backups. For example, one of our smaller clients with a network-attached storage device uses the built-in functionality of the NAS box to perform automatic backups to the cloud.
Here are some other examples of the options available to businesses looking to adopt cloud-based backups:
- Carry on using your existing backup software and use it for storage on the cloud via a “virtualized tape library”. Using the existing software licence you have already invested in entails minimal change and minimal cost.
- Use AWS and or Microsoft tools, such as Azure Backup, to manage backups and restore using cloud storage for your on-premise servers into the cloud. There's little cost for using those services, you're mainly paying for storage.
- For advanced backup solutions, third-party products such as Commvault can be deployed providing a single consistent platform for protecting data and applications across on-premise and cloud.
- In addition to protecting data using cloud backup, you can provide DR capability by taking copies of your servers and streaming them onto the cloud. Microsoft Azure site recovery is such a tool, replicating near instantaneously into the cloud. This option essentially offers you sophisticated disaster recovery into the bargain because if you do have a failure of either data centre or servers you can restore that service into operation running in the cloud in a short space of time, it could be within minutes. In a worst-case scenario where your premises are wiped out, you will not have to worry about losing your data stores as they are all off-site. It also means that there is far less for your people to do in the event of a DR invocation.
In summary
As we’ve said before on the topic of cloud and disaster recovery, cloud blurs the lines between DR and backup and now enables organisations that could not afford more than basic backups to build holistic data and application protection solutions, affording them far greater resilience.