Is Cloud Backup Safe?

  Traditional backup solutions involved moving data to some external media, and moving those media to a secure location. Commonly, this means copying the data to tape, and storing the tapes off-site, for example in underground storage. This is difficult and expensive, and exposes your data to its own special risks of theft and loss as the tapes are transported to offsite locations, possibly thousands of miles away.
 

Online backup has many advantages: it’s timelier, it doesn’t require difficult and expensive shipping and storage, and it can easily be integrated into data center operations. But IT managers often question its safety after all, the data is no longer under their control.
 

The right question might be to ask if traditional backup approaches are safe. A cloud backup strategy with a reliable vendor replicates your data to multiple geographically separated data centers. By storing the replicated data at multiple sites, the probability of a disastrous loss is reduced, since it’s unlikely for geographically separate locations to be impacted simultaneously.
 

Data theft is another issue, and frankly one that many companies would rather not think about. Physical security and encryption are both helpful, but they’re also complicated and expensive, and there are real economies of scale to consider. Physically securing a data center means special facilities, technical intrusion detection and prevention, and 24-hour security. It’s about as expensive to maintain a physically secure data center for a single firm, as it is to maintain a large data center serving many customers. Similarly, encryption, key management and key distribution are arcane processes that are hard to get right, while failures are very hard to detect. Effective use of encryption-based protection means managing secure key stores, that are preferably secured using NIST FIPS-certified technology and military-grade encryption, such as AES with 256-bit keys. These keys must then be transmitted securely, and constantly maintained to ensure protection.
 

Considered as a whole, the requirements for reliable, secure, safe, backup and recovery are complicated to implement. However, online backup solutions provide companies with best-of-class expertise without the need to provide their own infrastructure. When compared with all the issues of traditional data backup methods, online cloud backup is a much safer and more cost effective option.