The shift to remote work has accelerated cloud adoption for many businesses and IT organizations. Although the cloud has proven its value for organizations that have deployed there, IT decision-makers still rely heavily on traditional on-premises infrastructure to support business operations. Backup and disaster recovery solutions, being essential elements of a business continuity plan, are often best kept within the on-premises ecosystem for several reasons.
Speeds and Feeds
Close proximity to critical infrastructure helps support stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) for on-premises servers. For the common forms of downtime and data loss that businesses experience every day, recovering from a local source is still the fastest way to ensure rapid recovery. Keeping backup workloads on-premises gives IT administrators more flexibility in deciding on how they want to address disruptions because they don’t have to rely on the bandwidth restrictions of external-facing networks. Restore options like bare metal, image, system state, and files and folders are all viable when there are fewer bandwidth restrictions to worry about.
Command and Control
Although workers are increasingly remote and decentralized, businesses prefer the convenience, control and efficiency of having a central repository for their data. Protecting data in different locations, whether in the cloud or branch offices, can lead to redundant copies of the same data, which consumes more storage and costs more. Establishing a central repository allows businesses to save on storage costs through deduplication. It also gives them the confidence of knowing that, while their employees may be widely distributed, the data that runs the business is secure on-premises.
Legacy Platforms
Although cloud and “as-a-service” applications have become widely available and adopted, many businesses still rely on legacy systems like IBM iSeries and AIX. These will remain on-premises platforms for the foreseeable future, and so will the systems dedicated to protecting them. Support for legacy systems is often a critical factor for IT decision-makers.
Future-Proof
The next disruptive cloud platform is always right around the corner. Organizations that care deeply about agility fear being locked into a vendor in a way that restricts them from adopting or integrating other platforms. Replicating data on-premises gives IT organizations peace of mind knowing they’re always in charge of their data and not an external vendor.
Flex Time
At Carbonite, we understand how important flexibility is when it comes to choosing where you want to protect data. This is why we support a wide range of backup targets for both server and endpoint backup.
