5 factors to consider when selecting your cloud backup provider

March 31, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from CCI. Author: Paul Evans.

Cloud backup has been around for more than a decade. It’s one of the most mature applications of cloud technology and has become a common feature of the business landscape due to its reliability, efficiency and automation capabilities. Today, the cloud backup market is fairly saturated, offering businesses and consumers a wide range of services to choose between. Consequently, there are a number of factors to take into consideration when choosing a backup services provider. Asking the right questions will help you to differentiate between consumer-focused and business grade services and will ensure the service chosen meets your own specific needs.

1. Performance and Versatility

Contrary to popular belief, implementing an enterprise cloud backup service will enable a business to reduce its backup times by minimising the total volume of data being transferred to the backup platform on a daily basis. Advances in file scanning, data compression and deduplication, driven by competition, means that today’s leading cloud backup service providers are able to offer businesses much faster backups and often more rapid restores than traditional methods such as tape…

Most cloud backup services are ‘incremental forever’ following the first backup. This means that only files or blocks within files that have changed since the last backup are transferred offsite. Many service providers advertise impressive statistics to outline how effective this process is in reducing the data that will be backed up daily. In truth, these figures will vary from one environment to another, therefore it’s important to request a proof of concept, focusing on the server or servers that are likely to be the most challenging…

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