Increasingly, businesses are adopting cloud backup solutions to address data protection and replication requirements. No matter what the size or type of your business is, you need to protect your data from any threats including: hard drive failure, ransomware, security breach and natural disasters. Computech archiving solution can make it easy for you to back up your data.

What is cloud backup and how does it work?

Cloud backup, also known as online backup or remote backup, is a strategy for sending a copy of a physical or virtual file or database to a secondary, off-site location for preservation in case of equipment failure or catastrophe. The secondary server and data storage systems are usually hosted by a third-party service provider, who charges the backup customer a fee based on storage space or capacity used, data transmission bandwidth, number of users, number of servers or number of times data is accessed.

Implementing cloud data backup can help your organization’s data protection strategy without increasing the workload of information technology (IT) staff. The labor-saving benefit may be significant and enough of a consideration to offset some of the additional costs associated with cloud backup, such as data transmission charges.

How cloud backup works

In an organization a backup application copies data and stores it on different media or another storage system for easy access in the event of a recovery situation. While there are multiple options and approaches to off-site backup, cloud backup serves as the off-site facility for many organizations. In an enterprise usually uses a service provider to manage the cloud backup environment.

There are a variety of approaches to cloud backup, with available services that can easily fit into an organization’s existing data protection process. Varieties of cloud backup include:

● Backing up directly to the public cloud. One way to store organizational workloads is by duplicating resources in the public cloud. This method entails writing data directly to cloud providers, such Microsoft Azure. The organization uses its own backup software to create the data copy to send to the cloud storage service. The cloud storage service then provides the destination and safekeeping for the data, but it does not specifically provide a backup application. In this scenario, it is important that the backup software is capable of interfacing with the cloud’s storage service. Additionally, with public cloud options, IT professionals may need to look into supplemental data protection procedures.

● Backing up to a service provider. In this scenario, an organization writes data to a cloud service provider that offers backup services in a managed data center. The backup software that the company uses to send its data to the service may be provided as part of the service, or the service may support specific commercially available backup applications.

● Choosing a cloud-to-cloud (C2C) backup. These services are among the newest offerings in the cloud backup arena. They specialize in backing up data that already lives in the cloud, either as data created using a software as a service (SaaS) application or as data stored in a cloud backup service. As its name suggests, a cloud-to-cloud backup service copies data from one cloud to another cloud. The cloud-to-cloud backup service typically hosts the software that handles this process.

● Using online cloud backup systems. There are also hardware alternatives that facilitate backing up data to a cloud backup service. These appliances are all-in-one backup machines that include backup software and disk capacity along with the backup server. Most of those appliances also provide a link to one or more cloud backup services or cloud providers. These appliances typically retain the most recent backup locally, in addition to shipping it to the cloud backup provider, so that any required recoveries can be made from the local backup copy, saving time and transmission costs.

When an organization engages a cloud backup service, the first step is to complete a full backup of the data that needs to be protected. This initial backup can sometimes take days to finish uploading over a network as a result of the large volume of data that is being transferred. In a 3-2-1 backup strategy, where an organization has three copies of data on two different media, at least one copy of the backed up data should be sent to an off-site backup facility so that it is accessible even if on-site systems are unavailable.

Types of backup

In addition to the various approaches to cloud backup, there are also multiple backup methods to consider. While cloud backup providers give customers the option to choose the backup method that best fits their needs and applications, it is important to understand the differences among the three main types:

● Full backups copy the entire data set every time a backup is initiated. As a result, they provide the highest level of protection. However, most organizations cannot perform full backups frequently because they can be time-consuming and take up too much data storage capacity.

● Incremental backups only back up the data that has been changed or updated since the last backup. This method saves time and storage space but can make it more difficult to perform a complete restore. Incremental is a common form of cloud backup because it tends to use fewer resources.

● Differential backups are similar to incremental backups because they only contain data that has been altered. However, differential backups back up data that has changed since the last full backup, rather than the last backup in general. This method solves the problem of difficult restores that can arise with incremental backups.