Cloud Backup
What is cloud backup?
Cloud backup is an insurance policy against the loss of important information, enabling businesses to recover quickly from accidental deletions, data corruption, malware attacks and other disasters. Cloud backup solutions are flexible, easily implemented and scale on demand to accommodate any volume of business data.
How does cloud backup work?
Cloud backup protects business-critical data by storing multiple redundant copies of important information on cloud-based servers. Files are copied at the source and transferred via a public or private network to a cloud-based storage server, where data is maintained and updated continually and automatically.
What is the difference between cloud backup and cloud storage?
Cloud storage is volatile. It’s a virtual space for keeping important data, files and other information where it can be accessed, updated and altered by authorised users from practically any location at any time. Data in cloud storage is meant to be used.
Cloud backup, by comparison, is regularly updated but not intended for everyday use. It’s collected, compressed, often encrypted and safely stored for purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery.
What are the benefits of cloud backup?
Backing up important data for safekeeping is a recommended best practice much older than computing. Unless you wanted to risk losing written records in a fire or other disaster, you kept duplicates at separate locations. The same principle applies in the digital age.
Information in any medium can always be damaged or destroyed through a wide variety of misadventures, from simple human error to accidents or natural disasters to even deliberate acts of vandalism or sabotage. It always pays to have multiple redundant copies of business-critical files. A robust backup plan is absolutely essential as a safeguard against potentially catastrophic loss of important data.
Cloud backup offers significant advantages over traditional data protection:
· It’s more cost-effective than in-house solutions.
· It’s disaster-proof, protected on cloud-based servers at multiple off-site locations.
· It’s scalable, so backups can be maintained even as the volume of data grows.
It’s consolidated, so large organisations can maintain one backup solution for multiple locations.
· It’s accessible, so businesses can restore data at any location.
What are the challenges with cloud backup?
The growing popularity of cloud backup services makes it easy to overlook potential disadvantages.
Data is backed up across a public or private network, requiring adequate bandwidth and connectivity. Network performance or latency issues can depend on the volume of data and the limitations of the network itself.
Cloud backup means entrusting business-critical data to a third-party provider, which can introduce security concerns, especially where data privacy regulations are involved. Work with the provider to ensure that all policy requirements are observed.
Not all cloud backup providers offer the same service levels and cost structures. Before choosing a provider, make sure you evaluate their solution offering for platform incompatibilities, proprietary software, security and encryption standards, and administrative fees.
How is cloud backup related to cloud data protection?
Cloud data protection helps ensure the integrity and reliability of information stored in the cloud through a complex series of embedded backup and recovery systems and security protocols. Information in the cloud resides on physical servers maintained by the cloud storage provider, ideally with their own redundant backups in multiple locations. A disaster affecting one data centre should not destroy all copies of any cloud-based data hosted at that location.
Cloud backups benefit from the inherent protections already built into cloud-based storage systems, but also have their own layers of security that vary depending on the backup software and the service provider. A cloud backup is updated automatically and continuously, encrypted and duplicated to avoid accidental data loss, tampering or corruption.
HPE and cloud backup
Information is the life of every modern business. But the risk of losing business-critical data is an ever-present threat. A robust backup plan is vital to protect this all-important asset. HPE offers data backup and data security solutions to help your business mitigate the possibility of data loss or corruption.
HPE Backup and Recovery Service simplifies data protection with rapid recovery and cost-effective long-term retention in the cloud. Businesses benefit from efficient, built-in data reduction to help control storage volumes and costs, along with encryption and automation to ensure that the backup volumes are safe.
HPE GreenLake for Storage delivers a seamless cloud experience that combines the agility and flexibility of cloud operations with consumption-based data services. And HPE GreenLake for Data Protection helps protect your business against data loss, ransomware and other potential threats.