Have you considered cloud backups yet?
The cloud is a great tool that can help your business fully leverage its technology solutions, but one of the most common problems that people associate with the cloud is that it’s not nearly as secure as a private in-house IT network. However, contrary to popular belief, the cloud is a very secure medium for your data storage and deployment, particularly for your data backups.
For a demonstration, let’s take a common problem — like the storage of backed-up copies of data — and apply it to the cloud. There are two common ways to store data backups: on tape (which is prone to user error and requires a significant amount of physical space for effective use) and then cloud-based backup. Normally, data backups would take up a ton of space on your in-house network. Furthermore, storing your data backups on the network that you’re backing up is just plain silly. Therefore, it makes the most sense to store your data off-site in a secure data center or in the cloud.
Though tape backups have been used by businesses for a very long time, they’re an outdated technology that doesn’t appeal to the average small and medium-sized business. Tape can be considered a manual mode of data backup because it relies on human interaction to work properly. This means that it’s the responsibility of your staff to set the backup and make sure that it happens every night. Otherwise, you could potentially lose an entire day’s worth of work (or more). Furthermore, processing a backup is a resource-intensive task that shouldn’t be done during normal work hours. In general, the tape backup process is inefficient and dated at best, especially in light of more modern backup solutions.
The benefits of a cloud backup solution are overwhelming when compared to the typical tape backup solution. While tape requires humans to set and perform backups, a cloud-based data backup solution automatically takes snapshots of data that’s been changed since the last backup was taken. This eliminates the chance of user error and ensures that the backups are taken without a hitch. Unlike tape backups, which effectively take a backup of all data on the network, a cloud backup solution only tracks changes made to files. This means that there’s less strain placed on the system during the backup, meaning that data can be backed up multiple times without the severe repercussion of downtime.
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