Backing up data has become a standard business practice and in most industries it is an operational requirement. Today’s fast-growing highly mobile workforce is placing new demands on IT. As data growth increases, it finds its way onto laptops, desktops etc increasing security breach. Today, most companies have data protection and data security best practices in place to protect sensitive information while keeping IT costs in check.
When instituting a backup strategy, there are several factors to consider before choosing a method. These factors can help businesses determine whether a cloud backup solution would be more secure, cost-effective and reliable than portable media backup, such as tapes, for their organization.
Risk Free Data Security and Protection:
Today many people are opting to cloud technology for backup and restoration. But the common concern has always been security of the data. Most companies ensure that critical data is not accessible to everyone and with cloud these boundaries are set. But when it comes to tapes, their security largely depends on whether or not they are taken off-site. If not, your data is susceptible to natural disasters and theft. Cloud backup provides a virtually risk-free method for protecting important business data.
Better Reliability
Tapes and disks are infamously failure-prone and are susceptible to damage by the environment and improper handling. Storage Magazine reports that over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those tested, 77% found that tape backups failed to restore. With cloud backup the data is encrypted and stored on a remote server. Thus, there is virtually no risk of files being corrupted or lost. The data is available anytime, anywhere. Moreover, if there is a need to restore files, the recovery rate is far greater than using portable media.
Ease of Scalability
With cloud technology in place, the scalability factor is high as the vendor manages the growth infrastructure enabling data volumes to grow without any hassles. But with tapes, this flexibility is limited as scalability changes with storage volumes.
Lower Operating Costs
Another factor to consider is the economics of each method. Generally, tape drives cost thousands of dollars. With traditional tape backups, the tapes have to be physically transferred to a secure vault by experts, increasing logistic costs. Cloud backup eliminates these costs. With Evault, the charges are per month for their service, depending upon the amount of storage space the organization needs. The service also includes free 24/7 customer support.
Ease of Use:
Reliability and cost are important, but ease-of-use can also be a deciding factor when choosing a backup solution. With cloud backup, setting up the solution involves the simple process of signing up online and installing a client on the computer or server. Within minutes, you can begin backing up files. Portable media backup can be labour-intensive as hardware and/or software must be manually configured. This setup process can take several hours or even days to complete depending upon the size of the organization. Backing up to the portable drive can become time-consuming and impractical. With Cloud Backup and Recovery it is completely automated and you can schedule a setup at your convenient time.
Ease of data restoration:
When it comes to restore necessary files, cloud backup allows users to recover their files at any time from any location. This makes the entire process easy and efficient compared tapes. This has become a major reason that organizations are opting for cloud backup. Most portable media solutions require trained professionals for file restoration. If the tapes or disks are stored off-site, the company must also wait for them to be delivered and work on them for weeks to restore files. This downtime can suspend business operations and increase costs. With cloud, businesses are up and running within a few hours.
Future Proof:
As companies grow, data grows many folds. With cloud technology companies can continuously invest in performance hardware to meet customer storage requirements. As for tapes, the storage technology evolves around tapes, making this investment obsolete over time.
Ease of Assessment
When you compare factors like reliability, cost, ease-of-use and data security, it becomes clear to see that the benefits of online data backup are far superior to portable media backup. Businesses today can protect themselves by protecting their critical data.With Evault, the company’s critical data is safe regardless of the size of the organization.
Evault a Seagate Company provides Evault on premise, cloud connected and edge data protection solutions deployed in cloud technology to help small to midsized organisations protect and access their business data – anytime, anywhere, even when offline.
Sysfore Technologies is a reseller partner for Evault Cloud Backup and Recovery. Contact us for a free consultation.