Cloud backup isn’t necessarily the only or best choice for everyone. But cloud backup offerings continue to expand their capabilities and gain market acceptance. More providers are offering cloud backup services, and many companies, particularly those still using tape or disk-to-tape (D2T) are taking a closer look at their current backup solutions, to see if cloud backup makes more sense.
Navigating the array of providers and offerings to find the ideal solution for your needs can prove challenging. Many solutions are consumer or SOHO oriented, and lack business grade features. Other solutions billing themselves as enterprise provide more of a toolkit rather than a turnkey solution. Depending on your needs, you may need just backup, or your requirements may include compliance or business continuity/disaster recovery solutions. Zetta, for example, is a provider of enterprise online backup and disaster recovery.
Here is a quick overview of four key factors to look at in selecting the right cloud backup solution for your company: Bandwidth, Security, Accessibility, and Cost. (We’ll go into more detail about these in subsequent blog posts.)
BANDWIDTH
Bandwidth does not just refer the speed of the connection between your site and the backup provider. It also refers to the amount of bandwidth that the backup solution requires. And the amount of bandwidth required depends on several factors, including how much data needs to be uploaded for a backup, and what’s the “backup window” — how quickly does the backup have to be done.
SECURITY
Security includes protecting the data during the local backup process and throughout its end-to-end transport between your systems and the backup service. Security also concerns the digital and physical protection of the backup in the cloud data center(s) — for example, is it safe from natural disasters, network attacks, and live intruders?
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility refers to how your company — and other authorized parties — can access the backup data. For example, can a system administrator initiate a large retrieval via their mobile device? Can the backup provider quickly put a large retrieval onto a hard drive or storage appliance and ship it? Can IT connect the backup to other cloud services?
COST
Cost covers what you pay — not just per-month, but also any start-up fees, added costs for small or large restores, and other fees. What may look like a bargain may, when you add up all the fees, turn out not to be one.
In the next several posts, we’ll look at these factors more closely, and suggest some questions that companies should ask themselves and potential backup providers.
For more information and to run our bandwidth assessment tool, visit the Zetta cloud backup decision center.
Tags: Accessibility, Bandwidth, cloud backup, Cost, security
RSS