Small businesses have IT infrastructure that consists of a combination of workstations, file servers and application servers. But the data that is generated and processed from their relatively smaller IT setup is critical. For small businesses, when maintaining an IT infrastructure, the allocated budget takes the first hit. Setting up multiple servers in different locations to protect the data from disasters become unfeasible suggestions. They need a simpler and cost-effective data protection solution that does not compromise their data and uptime.
What is Cloud Backup?
The backup copy of your files/folders, applications and machine images can be stored in any storage location. It can be your physical storage volume, or a network drive or even a private storage in an offsite location. When you store the backup data in a secure cloud storage, it is called Cloud Backup or Online Backup.
Why do we need Online Backup?
Lack of IT budget should not prevent small businesses from protecting their data. Their data will be vulnerable to the ever-increasing data threats like ransomware, accidental deletion and disasters. What they need is a simple backup solution that will protect their data without large capex and opex.
This is where a Cloud Backup helps. By automatically backing up their data to a secure cloud periodically, they can address the backup woes for small businesses without worrying about scaling their storage or hardware maintenance.
Advantages of Cloud Backup
- No requirement to set up additional servers/data centers
- Cloud storage is cheaper compared to setting up and maintaining own hardware
- Backup data is always available. Cloud storage has no downtime. You can restore the data from anywhere based on requirement.
- As cloud storage stores your backup data offsite, this also doubles as a disaster recovery site.
- It is a simple, set it and forget it solution for your data protection
- Monitoring the backups is easier as the storage is a cloud service compared to storing it on-premise where you have to take note of storage consumption.
How does it work
Small businesses can deploy a third party software to back up their data based on their required scheduling policy and store the data in a cloud. This backup data can be downloaded from the cloud any time.
While selecting and evaluating a third party cloud backup software, the following factors needs to be considered:
- Backup efficiency – The backup software needs to back up the data efficiently through incremental backups using Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology. Also, any built-in storage reduction methods like compression/deduplication will be very helpful when it comes to cutting down on cloud storage expenditure.
- Scheduling & Retention – Your backup schedule and how much older backup data to retain should be configurable by the user without many limitations. These are necessary to reduce the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and to retain data for longer periods of time or for multiple versions.
- Usability – The backup software should be easier to install, get started and get the backup jobs running. More complex the tool, the more time and effort spent on configuring it.
- Pricing – The primary objective of opting for cloud backups is to reduce costs. The pricing of the software and the cloud storage costs should be affordable to fit right into your budget.
Vembu Backup for File & Application (Cloud)
Vembu, with its 15+ years of experience in data protection, offers an easy-to-use File & Application backup that you can deploy to back up your data to Vembu Cloud. Vembu Cloud is hosted in Amazon Web Services S3.
From Vembu OnlineBackup, you can back up the required files/folders and MS applications (MS Exchange, MS Outlook, MS SharePoint, MS SQL and MySQL) from Windows, Linux and Mac. The backup data is directly stored in Vembu Cloud, thereby bypassing the need for a local storage volume.
Key Features
Continuous data protection
Perform real-time incremental backup using advanced scheduling options that also offer minute/hourly/daily/weekly backup schedules.
Flexible Retention
Retain data up to 10 years after backup by managing your retention policy between time-based and version-based retention settings.
Inbuilt Encryption & Compression
The backup data is stored efficiently with default compression and secured in Vembu Cloud using AES-256 bit encryption algorithm.
Pre/Post backup commands
Run backup scripts for pre-freeze/post-thaw operations of your applications before running the backup job.
Restore from anywhere, anytime
The backup data is always available in Vembu Cloud. Any time there is a requirement to restore older data, you can just log in to Vembu Cloud and restore the data.
Bandwidth Throttling
Throttle the network bandwidth allocated for backup jobs to prevent the cloud backup from eating into your network.
Registry and System State backup
Backup all your system state components like Boot Files, AD, SYSVOL along with Registry settings for each user profile in Windows using Volume Shadow Service.
Backup network drives
Map network drives to the machine where OnlineBackup Client is installed and back up the data from the network drives to Vembu Cloud
Backup where-it-left-off
If there is a network interruption during data transfer to Vembu Cloud, Vembu BDR Suite will intelligently track and continue from where it was interrupted, without the need for you to start the backup process all over again.
Email Notifications
Get the status (like success, failure or missed) of backup jobs and recovery operations as reports directly to your inbox.
Backup Window
Set up a time period during which backup jobs should not run, thus preventing network usage during critical production hours.
Vembu OnlineBackup addresses your backup need without adding overhead expenditure thereby protecting your business from data loss.
Disadvantages of Cloud Backup
As with any solution, there are some disadvantages or challenges that a pure-cloud backup will not be able to address. Some of them are:
- Bandwidth – Backing up to cloud or recovering data is going to eat into your network bandwidth.
- Recovery constraints – Recovery can be performed any time. But multiple recovery options that are available for on-premise backup may not be available thus affecting your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
- Compliance concerns – Some regulations or even company policy might dictate that confidential data should not be backed up to the public cloud. In that case, having an option to store that data on-premise will be beneficial.
Vembu addresses these concerns by offering on-premise backup for your virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V), Windows servers/workstations and File/Application servers (Windows, Linux and Mac). You can learn more about Vembu BDR Suite from here.
Download the full-featured 30-day free trial of our latest version Vembu BDR Suite v4.1.0 and experience modern data protection for your environment.
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