Article by Teamy
With the drastic shifts in technological paradigms, cloud backup has become essential for every business or corporate entity. As complicated as it sounds, it’s backing up the data to a cloud-based environment, usually offsite from the original location. In other words, there are multiple servers and the data is collected from multiple sources and electronically transmitted to one podium that hosts the cloud IT environment. Through cloud backup services, users typically transfer data over a secured internet connection to the cloud backup system.
Restoration
People are still confused if cloud backups are effective. Well, it turns out cloud backups can keep each uploaded file safe and can be restored anytime.
Consider a scenario where you had an important file on a server, but a hardware failure caused the file to be corrupted, what are you going to do? Nothing if you don’t have a backup copy and can’t access a similar file if it was not uploaded on the cloud.
Through scheduled cloud backup services, all critical files are regularly backed up to a secure remote location. During the backup process, data is compressed, encrypted for safe transfers to cloud backup servers. Most users opt for incremental backups as it appends to an initial full backup and hence speeds up data backup process.
When To Use Cloud Backup
Cloud backup services are popular for their convenience. Organization do not have to invest heavily in data backup hardware and software. They just need to engage a cloud backup provider who supplies all these resources for a periodic service fee.
For small organizations that have lesser data to backup, costs of purchasing a dedicated backup infrastructure and of hiring an in-house backup team is eliminated.
On the other hand, large-scale companies use cloud backup services to archive critical business data to multiple locations, with considerations for Business Continuity Planning and IT Disaster Recovery strategies.
Cloud Backup Services Approach
When it comes to cloud backup services, there are multiple approaches that impact data protection streams. Following are some approaches:
- The first approach is backing up onsite data to the public cloud, which is about duplicating the resource to a public cloud e.g Microsoft Azure
- The second approach is backing up to a backup service provider’s secure and highly-managed offsite private cloud data center. Experienced providers often are also DRaaS Companies (Disaster Recovery As A Service)
- The third approach is cloud-to-cloud backup scenario. Through this approach, data that already resides in a cloud environment such as SaaS (Software As A Service) is transferred via cloud backup service to a different cloud location
