A recent report from McAfee says cybercrime is a $1 trillion drag on the global economy. Those dollars can, for the most part, be attributed to lost data, lost productivity, and ransomware. That big number should set just about every business on edge. While it’s pretty close to impossible to prevent cybercrime, you can do the next best thing: make sure you have a backup and disaster recovery plan, and the right hardware and software in place to ensure you can get back in business quickly if disaster strikes.
To help you get there, last fall we did a post about the backup and disaster recovery 3-2-1 rule and our take on what best backup practices should be today. As we wrote then, the “3” in “3-2-1” refers to the number of backups you should take. The “2” refers to locations, meaning one backup copy onsite, and one backup copy offsite, or at least off-network, but close enough to make it easy to retrieve if disaster strikes. The “1” refers to keeping a third backup copy in a highly secure offsite location—your failsafe backup. While the cloud may not be your only option for this third copy, we think its benefits are very clear. Here are the top six benefits you’ll realize if the “1” in your backup and disaster recovery 3-2-1 plan is in the cloud:
1. Cloud backups can reduce costs
Maintaining and scaling your on-premises infrastructure can be costly. Adding in the cost of buying and maintaining servers and software licenses for a redundant backup solution can drive expenses out of the park. Then there’s the time and cost of IT teams managing your backups. Finally, even the best redundant systems can be breached. We noted how much that can cost at the top of this post. That leads us to the cloud. Backing up your data to the cloud means you don’t need to buy more backup servers, drives, disks, tapes, or any other hardware or software. No more maintenance and no more licenses.
2. Cloud backups are more secure
Cloud providers have made—and continue to make—massive investments in data security innovations that leave fewer openings for attacks. One of the biggest challenges for in-house IT teams is keeping software patched and up to date. You can count on your cloud provider to keep its systems current with the latest defenses. Not only because regulatory mandates and laws require it to do so, but also because its reputation is its most valuable asset (after your data). Clouds are also highly resilient, so you can be confident that your backups are always secure and always available.
3. Clouds scale easily and cost-effectively
Storing your backups in the cloud means you can pay-as-you-grow for storage. That makes scaling easy and cost-effective. When you need more storage for your backups—or you add more retention points—the amount of storage you use automatically grows with you.
4. Clouds make IT easier
On-premises infrastructures require maintenance, management, updates, and upgrades. When you store your backups in the cloud you’ll have one less thing to worry about. You also don’t need to manage your backups when you choose a cloud solution that includes a “set it and forget” backup feature that lets you quickly set up your backups to meet your RTO and RPO.
5. Clouds are always accessible
Data that’s backed up to the cloud can be accessed anytime, from anywhere, often from any device with an internet connection. So even if your data center gets drowned in a flood and your offsite backup gets burned in a fire, you’ll still be able to access your cloud backups, pretty much no matter what, even if you can’t get to your data center for some time.
6. Clouds can help you recover faster
When looking for a cloud solution for backup and disaster recovery, it’s worth considering the value of business continuity versus the cost of downtime and lost data. StorageCraft Cloud Services is a perfect example. Our disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution was purpose-built for disaster recovery, so you can recover your data instantly. Even more important, you can count on 100 percent business continuity with complete, orchestrated one-click failover. That minimizes downtime and may very well pay for itself by minimizing the aftermath of a single data loss.
Originally published on the StorageCraft Recovery Zone Blog, February 18, 2021.
