Written by Xuan Luan for I-Net Dynamics

What is Cloud Backup?

Cloud backup is the act of backing up your data in a remote server. This strategy is mostly used when preparing for your disaster recovery process. This copy of your business data can be easily accessed and restored in case of disasters such as hardware failures or human mistakes.

Your data can now be replicated in the cloud, which is a distributed and connected server resources. Apart from your local data version, businesses and organizations can ensure that their data is always backed up and easily accessible via the Internet.

How to backup and restore the data

Cloud backup service providers often provide you with a backup application to be installed in your on-premises or virtual machines. For example, Microsoft Azure Backup Service has Azure Backup Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent for on-premises Windows Server machines from which you can then configure your backup settings. Generally, the data is collected, encrypted, and transferred to the service provider. While the first round of backup should be a full system backup you can opt to arrange for incremental backup according to your schedule. Utilizing incremental backup instead of a full one reduces time and bandwidth consumption to transfer data to the cloud. You can also run ad-hoc backups whenever you want.

What I have said above is a very basic and simplified mechanism. Service providers usually have many backup strategies depending on what you want to back up. They might also differ in some other backup support options including security, encryption, compression and retention limits. For your best cloud backup strategy, contact us for consultancy.

As a backup service, there will be no changes to your applications and data. The primary data is still in the original location, which can be in a local or another cloud server. However, you should have a secondary data backed up in another location which can be used for recovery. The backup frequency should be decided on your business requirements as well as the cloud backup service provider’s retention policy.

For restoration, it’s mostly intuitive and easy in the cloud service provider portal, e.g. Azure portal. Depending on your types of backups (disk, files, VMs or databases), you can restore them via an online portal within a few clicks.

 Key Benefits of Cloud Backup

• Cost-Effectiveness: avoid extra infrastructure costs
• Reliability and Availability: you should go with reputable service providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Google, and IBM. Moreover, it helps to avoid or at least minimize the risks of several failures due to improper infrastructure, hardware damage, and accidental overwrites or deletions. Cloud data is accessible everywhere via the Internet.
• Ease of Management: cloud service providers often take care of these management tasks and provide useful monitoring and reporting tools for your management needs.
• Security: reliable providers should emphasize your data’s security with encryption data transfer. Moreover, they can protect you against ransomware with multi-factor authentication or watchers that flag suspicious actions

For enterprises, to implement cloud backup, you need to consider multiple other factors from your backup size, location, backup methods to service providers’ reputation and offers. With some specific businesses, you may also have to consider data protection compliance of the providers. To have a detailed assessment and suitable consultancy, contact us here.