Cloud backup has literally revolutionized the backup space. With its special qualities such as pay as you go, anytime – anywhere services the landscape of data backup and storage has changed forever. Some of the advantages cloud backup offers over traditional backup (external drives, USBs, CD, DVDs, magnetic tapes, etc.) are summarized below:
- Multi-tenancy: – Traditional storage systems and their scale-out derivatives were never designed for multi-tenancy. Cloud storage’s custom metadata provides unprecedented layers of security and comes with an inbuilt encryption. Even if someone were able to crack the encryption, they would have to intercept a minimum of 12 data streams (unlikely) and as many as 64 (highly unlikely) just to read the data.
- Disaster Recovery Facility: – Disaster recovery in cloud computing is one of the most important things for any customer to consider when investigating service providers. This facility replicates your entire data center in real time to a data center "in the cloud". The real-time data replication and application recovery software will ensure that in the event of a disaster, you will be up in running in minutes rather than days or weeks by backing up your data with minimal to no data loss.
- Eliminates disruptive data migrations: – Data migration is sometimes a time consuming and costly process. According to Bloor Research, 84% of all data migration projects exceed budget or time estimates, or both. With the help of cloud storage, you can store your data online and can download the data elsewhere required; the only requirement being an internet connection and nothing else.
- Cost Reduction: – By using cloud backup you are paying for what you are using and what you need. So, it depends on your usage or demand you are charged for the service. Also with the help of cloud service, the costs associated with data recovery also reduce as the service comes with a disaster recovery system.
- Improves recovery time for small data sets: – File recovery from cloud storage is faster as compared to magnetic tape storage as it doesn’t require physical transport from the offsite location, tape handling or seek time. Files to be recovered are located and streamed over the WAN connection, saving time and eliminating the need for a local tape infrastructure.
- No Prerequisites: – By using cloud storage you don’t have to worry about any hardware infrastructure to maintain. As the service is available online so there is no need to buy any software and to install it on your system. Also, there are fewer requirements of skilled technicians and engineers by using cloud storage as you don’t have to maintain any hardware and for data recovery at the time of disaster.