Among the strategies to ensure IT continuity, backup is the most traditional and widespread, made more exciting today by the possibility of using a cloud backup service. The cloud option for backup is not only innovative but also helpful in reducing complexity and costs significantly.
Distributed companies with increasingly digital and data-driven processes can ensure the availability of data and the protection of business environments in as-a-service with the cloud without facing heavy capital investments (CapEx) to create and maintain backup and disaster recovery support infrastructures.
A cloud backup service also fulfills the burden of protecting modern distributed IT environments, acting as an enabler for new businesses in which it is impossible to tell customers: “sorry, there is a failure; we are not operational.” A resource available to peripheral offices, small and medium-sized companies that in the past could have had different protection for themselves and their customers than large companies.
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How a cloud backup service works
To operate, cloud backup services make use of local and remote resources for saving and restoring data and system images useful for restarting. They are stored and safeguarded according to security standards that are generally much higher than those obtainable in small and medium company data centers.
As with traditional backup, cloud backup services allow data to be safeguarded against possible incidents that produce physical or logical damage (we also think of malware that disables critical systems) to individual PCs, servers, and storage up to the entire site where the data center is located. In cloud backup, the data safeguarded is generally encrypted and transmitted remotely through network connections with the cloud service provider.
Some key benefits of cloud backup service
Network quality and copy/sync strategies enable better recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) than many of today’s systems. The ability to access remotely from anywhere allows you to collect data from branches, sales agencies, and smart working users and be able to restore it wherever the network is accessible. According to market and open source standards, virtual server images and containerized software allow you to carry out restore operations on physical servers and IaaS cloud infrastructures, managing to restore services more quickly in the event of a disaster.
The five characteristics of choosing an effective cloud backup service
A cloud backup service must be able to safeguard data in concert with the needs and times of the business, which requires care in planning and designing the most effective policies.
Let’s see below the most relevant features of cloud backup:
Expert-managed cloud backup service.
The use of a cloud backup service must respect the need to have the advice of experts to whom you can entrust the configuration of the services and, over time, the monitoring, updating, and effectiveness tests.
Comprehensive IT security
The backup must protect all the systems in use, whether they are physical or virtual environments, including the applications that run on them. The supported environments include Microsoft, VMware, Linux KVM, and Nutanix, and the capabilities needed to manage partial restores of individual applications, starting with those on Oracle and SAP platforms.
Cloud and Saas backup service
Although it may seem tautological, cloud backup must also be able to safeguard the data produced by Saas applications in the cloud. This is the case, for example, of the protection of Microsoft 365 productivity environments (formerly Office 365 ) and many HR and CRM applications in use.
Cloud storage and backup service
On the cloud storage front, the possibility of choosing the physical location of the data must be present to guarantee GDPR compliance and to be able to respond to the requirements of critical sectors (health, PA …) in terms of data jurisdiction.
Costs of the cloud backup service
Finally, transparency and flexibility on service costs are generally calculated based on the GB/month exchanged on the network and the data space that the provider must keep available. In this context, the contractual flexibility to meet the inevitable changes over time is appreciable.
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