7 Reasons You Need a Cloud Backup Service
As the cloud continues its relentless march to IT dominance, it’s only natural that cloud-based backup solutions are gaining in popularity.
Everyone reading this will know the importance of backing up data. If you don’t have a backup solution, better contact your IT supplier sooner rather than later!
This isn’t an article about ‘why you need to back up data’ but for the sake of completeness, let’s quickly run through the key reasons why all business organisations are advised to deploy a backup service.
As a recap, a backup service provides business continuity, data safety, data security and peace of mind in the event of:
- Natural disaster
- Accidental file deletion by manual error
- File corruption
- Cyberattack
- Other unexpected disastrous events that result in data deletion or loss.
Should any of these events come about, your backup solution will ensure that your business has access to previous document versions, email archives, database contents, financial information, operational and planning information and sources of intellectual property.
Options for backup
An increasingly popular choice is the cloud backup route, which offers numerous options, benefits and advantages over ‘conventional’ backup solutions, and is highly efficient and cost effective.
A key requirement for businesses suffering a data loss or theft is to get back to full operation as quickly as possible. The cloud backup solution ensures that if the unexpected happens, your business can be back up and running again quickly and with relative ease as all data is – by definition – backed up remotely and securely in the cloud.
Backup for Office365
Many Office365 users assume that their data is naturally or automatically backed up, so while data loss is not always front of mind for them, it is nonetheless a major worry. The fact is that even Microsoft cannot guarantee a seamless, fast and complete restore of data that is lost or deleted.
To complicate matters, even when Office365 data is retrievable, the process is cumbersome and retention policies vary according to application. In OneDrive, for example, data deleted is gone forever and can’t be restored. The usual ‘rollback’ options are available, but this is not granular or detailed and is a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
The ideal solution is a cloud-based backup solution to complement Office365.
Benefits of cloud-based backup solutions
1. Superfast restore time
If your vital business data becomes inaccessible at source for any reason, “bare metal” restores can be performed very quickly with backups retrieved and restored to secondary machines. This saves you valuable business critical time when you need to become operational as quickly as possible.
2. Automated failover in case of server failure
With public and private cloud services, your data is stored remotely on servers housed in large data centres. There are normally systems in place to allow a new server to take over from a failed server very quickly, minimising impact on the services you use.
3. Fully managed
Cloud backup is normally fully managed, which means no manual processes are required on your part. Automated cloud backup processes ensure that your cloud data is always protected in the event that you need to recover lost or overwritten data.
4. Granular restores
Data can be restored on a priority and granular basis. That means you can drill down to locate and restore a single file from backup if necessary, which is convenient in cases where the file has been deleted by mistake.
5. Definable retention policies
By defining your retention policy, you can decide which files you want to back up – and when. This offers you the perfect balance of daily, weekly and monthly backups to fit with your business processes.
6. Low cost and a range of options
Rates for cloud multi-storage backup solutions are typically very competitive, and usually start with a standard monthly management cost per server with a sliding scale ‘per Gigabyte’ cost. Alliance Solutions sliding scale data storage costs depend on the volume of data.
Next steps
Alliance Solutions offers a multi-storage cloud backup solution for all your data, with a flexible range of options that allow you to define backup routines around your specific business needs.
Even better, as a customer of an Alliance Solutions IT support and management contract, you’ll benefit from Office365 Mailbox backup at £1 cost per month, plus competitive storage rates.
Contact us for more information about our cloud backup solutions on 0800 292 2100.