Every day, more companies are adopting cloud-based data protection strategies—especially in the small and midsize market—for reasons related to costs, staffing and space. At the same time, tape is seen as a critical component in larger organizations, especially for archival data that is seldom accessed.
Many small and midsized companies are looking to eliminate or reduce their reliance on tape, often for economic efficiencies. Many organizations eliminate tape entirely, but others will rely on it for long-term data retention.
When talking about making the move to cloud backup, there are five motivations IT pros typically focus on:
1. DRaaS
Many cloud service providers are moving from providers of basic backup and storage services to more robust disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) providers, offering emergency application hosting capabilities once delivered by a subscription data center operator or “hot site.” If your continuity plan involves replication of virtual machines at the DRaaS site, it may make sense for them to have backup data already at that location, too.
2. Remote offices
Clouds can provide backup services in branch offices or remote offices where you don’t have tape technology or the staff to operate it correctly. And remember, simply getting a copy of data outside the walls of your facility helps to safeguard against loss or compromise.
3. Selective restore
Cloud-based backup and restore is far simpler for end users than tape-based restores, especially when recovering a single file or dataset that has been deleted or corrupted. A good cloud service will provide a listing of files, objects or datasets to the user, enabling selective on-the-fly restore.
4. No upfront hardware investment
In many cases, there is no upfront investment in hardware, though you may need to beef up metro or WAN connectivity.
5. Staff resources/training
A good cloud service provider can eliminate the need to train employees in tape operations or to pay maintenance on tape systems over time.
With Carbonite EVault™ and Carbonite DoubleTake™, you have access to backup, high availability, migration and DRaaS solutions to protect the full spectrum of environments.
