Here’s the situation many SMB IT directors are facing when they come to us — their business has critical data that needs to be backed up offsite but the existing server backup solution has technical limitations or cost restrictions. Usually they have about 2TB of data — a mix of files with important IP, and data from SQL, Exchange, and web servers.
Their goal is to add functionality and simplify the tasks around backup, so IT staff can concentrate on building and supporting services that forward business goals.
They know that investing in tape backup isn’t the right choice and that “hybrid cloud” solutions based on appliance hardware just mask terrible data transfer performance.
Depending on the environment & budget, Zetta Data Protect may be the right choice. Even when we’re not, this is the advice we give to IT Directors on what features to look for when selecting a cloud backup service:
1. Ease of Set Up
The backup agents should install in minutes and then require only a few clicks to establish the appropriate policies.
2. Multiple OS Support
Most online backup services support Windows laptops and servers. A more complete service also supports Linux and Apple’s Mac OSX.
3. Lightweight Agents
To minimize the disk and CPU load on servers and laptops the software backup agent should be very light. To reduce the amount of network traffic, there should be agents for each device that can detect any changed files or blocks and send only those changes to the backup site.
4. Automatic Validation
The service should include immediate verification of all backups when they occur and regular bit-by-bit checks on the backed up data to ensure it will restore properly. Any restores also need to be validated for accuracy.
5. Data Deduplication
The backup vendor should provide data deduplication so you are not paying to have multiple copies of a file backed up.
6. Multiple Backup Instances
The backup service should create multiple copies of the data and offer to store it at more than one data center so that whether a disk, a rack or a whole data center goes offline, you still have instant access to your data.
7. Ease of Restoration
Single files and folders should be able to be restored by just dragging them from backup onto the server or laptop. Restoring entire servers should be as simple as mounting the drive from backup.
8. Browser Access
Both administrators and users should be able to access the backup through a browser rather than having to load and learn a specialized backup interface.
9. Self-Service Restoration
There is no reason for IT to get involved when a user accidentally deletes a file. End users should have permission to see and restore their own files from the remote location but not be able to view, access or alter any other files.
10. Multi-Platform Support
The files should restore to any platform, not just a duplicate of the server that created it. This gives the customer greater flexibility in upgrading systems or using alternate equipment at a DR location.
11. Reporting
The backup vendor should provide daily reports of all backups as well as regular SSAE-16 service audits to maintain compliance with existing standards.
This is the list of features to look for in a online server backup provider. Beyond these, you also want to make sure that the vendor is one that focuses on providing complete business-level backup services, not just a bunch of disk space, and has the expertise needed to optimize a solution that meets all your current and future needs.
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