Does anyone still backup to tape? Turns out the answer is yes, lots of companies still use tape as a backup media. If your goal is 3-2-1 backup (keeping at least 3 copies of your data, storing them on at least 2 different types of storage, and keeping 1 of them off site), tape is a perfectly valid choice—for one of your backups. We wouldn’t recommend keeping all three copies of your data on tape, though. For most businesses today, the cloud is the ideal destination for backups.
Advantages of Cloud Backup
The biggest advantage of cloud backup is its availability. Backup tapes get lost; the cloud is always there. Someone usually needs to be physically present to retrieve a backup tape; the cloud can be accessed remotely. Since the data on a backup is often needed urgently, this availability is a big benefit that can significantly reduce recovery times.
Another big advantage of cloud backup is that you never run out of room. While you’ll want to manage your cloud storage costs, it’s always possible to expand your storage nearly instantaneously; there’s no more need to provision spare capacity in advance of need. Along with reducing the risk that space limitations will make a backup fail, cloud backup processes can use deduplication and compression to reduce the storage required.
Cloud backup procedures are highly automated and reliable. The process doesn’t rely on fragile homegrown scripts. As a result, teams don’t need to babysit the process and can focus on other important IT tasks instead.
Implementing Cloud Backup
Your choice of cloud backup tools will depend on which cloud you’re using, so you’ll want to consider the cloud provider’s general reputation and service level agreement as well as the backup software vendor. Look for these features:
- End to end encryption
- High bandwidth
- Support for all hypervisors and operating systems in your data center
- Automation with reports and notifications to alert of exceptions
- Flexible recovery options
Integrating cloud backup into your processes is easy with Veeam Cloud Connect. dcVAST can provide the support you need to set up the process and managed services to monitor and support it on an ongoing basis. Contact us to learn more about how cloud backups with Veeam can benefit your disaster recovery process.
