What are the benefits and drawbacks of cloud backup? Why should you use cloud backup, and how does it fit into your enterprise backup strategy? People need to know the answers to these and other questions.
Businesses can benefit from cloud backup and recovery to avoid data loss and downtime. The average loss per downtime for small businesses is $8,000, and even higher for medium and large businesses. With ransomware as a constant threat, cloud backup is no longer an afterthought.
Data protection was previously low on the list of enterprise priorities and budget allocations. Enterprises can no longer afford the risk of downtime, data loss, or data breaches, so cloud backup and recovery has become a popular method of data protection. Before we get into the pros and cons of cloud backup, let’s first define it.
What exactly is cloud backup?
The term cloud backup refers to the combination of cloud computing technology and backup. Cloud computing platforms are off-site data centers offered by cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and others. Backups provide secure copies from which data can be recovered. When the two are used together, it means making backups and storing them in the cloud (off-site data center). Every innovative solution has advantages and disadvantages. Cloud backup is no different. The following are the benefits and drawbacks of cloud backup.
The advantages of cloud backup and recovery include the ability to restore data from any location to any hardware.
Cloud backup can restore your business data no matter where you are. There is no need to reboot physical servers, replace damaged hard drives, or troubleshoot network issues with cloud backup. Enabling cloud recovery is as simple as a keyboard click as long as the enterprise’s hardware is up and running.
Companies can restore data to similar or different hardware, avoiding significant data loss. The main distinction is that cloud backup does not allow direct access to the data. If data is needed, it must first be restored somewhere. Backup data in the cloud will be “dehydrated.” Dehydrated means compressed and in a format that cannot be directly read.
Rapid Recovery with Cloud Disaster Recovery The ability to recover and access data with minimal latency significantly reduces recovery time objectives (RTOs). This feature comes in handy during natural disasters, hardware failures, and ransomware attacks.
There will be no hardware adoption and less maintenance.
No additional hardware is required for cloud backup and recovery. To set up a cloud backup, an organization only needs to install a backup agent on its systems. The majority of the process takes care of itself once the backup and restore jobs are configured.
The elimination of hardware has the following advantages.
- Remove hardware costs, as well as hardware energy consumption and maintenance costs.
- Data protection management requires fewer IT personnel.
- Installation and configuration can be completed in hours rather than months.
- Data management is simple, easy, and inexpensive.
- Compliance is easier to achieve.
HIPAA/HITRUST, FedRAMP, CJIS, FISMA, and other data regulations specify how businesses must protect their customers’ data. Data compliance can be a difficult and time-consuming test. Cloud backup aids compliance because most cloud service providers actively invest in data security.
Using compliance services can be extremely beneficial to businesses. The compliance process can be streamlined by using compliant cloud backups.
Utilize resources as needed.
Cloud backups can be easily scaled. This feature allows cloud users to start small and scale up as their data grows. The use of on-demand resources lowers the cost of cloud backup. This is an excellent option for businesses looking to cut costs and get more bang for their buck.
Cloud users can increase CPU, memory, and storage capacity as backup data grows.
Pay only for what you use.
The use of resources on-demand also aids in the control of cloud backup costs. Users of cloud backup only pay for what they use. On-premise deployments, on the other hand, necessitate a significant upfront investment in hardware, much of which goes unused for extended periods of time.
While cloud backups do not completely replace on-premise data centers, they are an important component of an effective data protection strategy.
Cloud Backup and Recovery Drawbacks
Without connectivity, cloud backup and recovery are not possible.
The main disadvantage of storing backup data offsite is that it is unavailable if no Internet connection is available. It will be impossible to backup or restore data if the Internet is unavailable.
Complete data recovery takes more time.
If the organization’s production environment fails, it takes longer to download and restore data from cloud backup. The amount of data, Internet speed, available bandwidth, and hardware capabilities all influence recovery time.
This is not the same as cloud disaster recovery. Cloud disaster recovery enables businesses to resume operations by restoring data to the cloud platform. It takes a long time to restore data from the cloud platform to the hardware.
The technical support provided is infuriating.
The quality of support provided by public cloud service providers is not well known. Support requests can include emails back and forth, long waits, and months of resolution time, depending on the issue.
The quality of support for private clouds varies by provider. Third-party service providers who use public/private clouds face the same challenges.
More bandwidth is required for regular cloud backups.
Cloud backups can be scheduled hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Backups for hot tier workloads can be scheduled in real time. Depending on an organization’s business priorities and cloud backup schedule, bandwidth consumption is frequently high.
It is safe to assume that if an organization performs regular backups, the data protection system will require more bandwidth. This raises the issue of allocating available bandwidth between cloud backup and day-to-day business operations.
How do you pick a cloud backup solution? Cloud backups are a low-cost way to safeguard an organization’s mission-critical data. They automate daily tasks and make data protection for large amounts of data easier. When properly configured, cloud backups are not only a necessity, but also a business asset.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows you to restore the entire virtual machine and all of its data from any restore point (full, incremental or differential backup) without affecting the original backup data. Backups that have been deduplicated or compressed can be restored. This is a great solution for ensuring business continuity and minimizing critical business interruptions caused by a disaster or system failure.
You can also quickly check the availability of backup data by instantly restoring a target VM to a remote location in minutes. Ensure that in the event of a true disaster, all VMs can be recovered and the data they contain won’t be lost or corrupted. Vinchin offers solutions such as VMware backup for the world’s most popular virtual environments, XenServer backup, XCP-ng backup, Hyper-V backup, RHV/oVirt backup, Oracle backup, etc.
