Cloud Backup Selection
In this data-rich age, all organizations rely on data to succeed. Selecting a cloud backup solution to ensure your organization has always-on data access is critical to your performance.
However, so many factors influence the selection of a provider. These may include:
- Time: The initial planning and backup of your data can be hugely time-consuming.
- Legacy Data: Relocating legacy backup solutions can lead to unexpected costs, incomplete data, and compromised performance.
- Security: Transferring data to a new backup source presents risk of loss.
- Geography: Regional data privacy rules vary and can be hard to understand.
Despite these challenges, organizations need to find ways to secure their valuable data arrays. The risk of accidental loss or unauthorized access and data loss can result in total business failure.
Businesses get the best results from taking a thoughtful approach to backup selection.  Including how data is stored, secured, and kept resilient. We’ve put together five factors all organizations should consider when selecting a cloud backup solution.
1.  Consider Migration Requirements
To be effective, a backup solution must reflect the organization’s business continuity needs. The first step to selecting a backup solution is a discovery exercise, where your organization identifies critical data, storage requirements, recovery time and recovery point objectives, and preferred storage locations.
This discovery effort will result in the creation of a business continuity plan, which will also consider your organization’s regulatory and compliance requirements. Designing a solution that both offers fast disaster recovery and meets regulatory needs requires significant resources and effort.  In some instances, regulatory requirements may request physical backups to support your cloud backup solution. In others, you may require a series of remote servers in diverse locations.
Whatever combination of backup solutions you chose, they should all be selected for their ability to capture snapshots of your data, recover files, and restore databases.
2.   Cloud Backup for File Management
Once deployed, cloud backup provides the quickest and easiest method to back up documents. There’s a few things that should be considered when selecting a backup solution for file management.
Cloud backup is also an ideal solution for file management when the volume of data on your user’s computers begin to slowdown desktop and network operations. When selecting a cloud backup, ensure the solutions doesn’t place additional burdens on your IT infrastructure. An ideal solution frees up local storage, making space for operational optimization.
Cloud backup solutions considers both the security of individuals files and organizational data. This is achieved by the used of an encryption key that ensures data is transferred to the cloud securely.
A user management console is also important at the organizational level. An IT administrator should be able create data and user management rules. These rules ensure that individual users have access to the correct files, and that their data is backed-up in compliance with policies and procedures.
3.   Application Backup
Your business continuity plan may also require backup for applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Most organizations look for a cloud backup solution that retains application data, manages recovery points and enforces policies.
Retaining data at the application level ensures that shared directories, email data, web content and other business information is available for recovery. This is helpful should data be accidentally or purposely deleted, but is required for compliance.
4.   Endpoint Backup
Most IT networks consist of a series of endpoints, including laptops, desktops and mobile devices.  Each device with a remote connection to the corporate network creates an entry point for potential security threats. Endpoint backup ensures that data on each of these devices is retained and available for restoration. Should a device fail, be stolen or lost, the organization can still access the data stored locally on the device. With backup frequency clearly defined in the business continuity plan, endpoint data will be stored to the cloud regularly.
5.   Virtual Machine Deployment
Cloud backup is made possible by simulated IT environments hosted by a third-party provider. These dedicated data centres replicate an on-premise hosting environment, without the complications and maintenance associated with physical resources. Engineered for maximum flexibility, virtual machines securely backup database environments and other popular business applications.
When choosing a cloud backup tool, ensure that the details of the virtual machine are detailed in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Cloud Backup for Risk Management
Choosing a cloud backup solution is about risk management. Your organization needs data protection to survive. In many cases, organizations need secondary copies for business continuity in the case of disaster, and other copies to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
Still feeling unsure about how to select a backup solution in the cloud? The HostedBizz professional services team is skilled in serving clients to build a cloud backup solution that removes the burden of IT ownership from an organization. Our team can help plan out your needs and execute a solution.