Online back-up or cloud recovery?
Posted by amcanty on October 29, 2009
Backing up files and data online has been around for quite a while, but it has never really taken off in a big way for business customers. Now new solutions are coming to market that use “the cloud” for the backup and recovery of company data, but how do these differ to online backup and what can they offer? writes Ian Masters, UK sales and marketing director at Double-Take Software.
“Cloud recovery” can be a nebulous term, so I would define it based on the solution having the following features:
1. The ability to recover workloads in the cloud
2. Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning
3. Pay-per-use billing model
4. An infrastructure that is more secure and more reliable than the one you would build yourself
5. Complete protection – ie, non-expert users should be able to recover everything they need, by default.
If a solution does not meet these five criteria, then it should be called an online backup product.
There is an old saying in the data protection business that the whole point of backing up is preparing to restore. Having a backup copy of your data is important, but it takes more than a pile of tapes (or an online account) to restore. You might need a replacement server, new storage, and maybe even a new data centre, depending on what went wrong.
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