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Contributed by Christophe Bertrand, Vice President of Product Marketing, Arcserve

Cloud-Based Backup and Recovery: The Secret Data Protection Weapon for Small Businesses

Every business knows the importance of good data protection, so I know what you're thinking: "My data is protected perfectly fine and I perform full backups each and every day." But what are you doing to protect against disaster events?  An extended power outage, flood, or fire can make your critical information systems inaccessible, crippling your business.

Traditional backup is changing and is truly becoming "cloudified," as this method offers significant new technologies and economies of scale for disaster recovery. For small and mid-size organizations, the total cost of building and maintaining a second data center make disaster recovery unaffordable. However, with cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, these organizations have access to an unlimited supply of computer resources to run applications and store critical information. Further, simple subscription-based pricing makes it readily accessible, giving organizations the ability to scale up and down as their needs require.

Multiple options are available for cloud-based backup and recovery services. Depending on the needs of the organization, the best option will likely entail one of three models: Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS), and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Moving forward, more small and mid-size organizations will adopt one of the following models as the security and affordability make them viable for data protection and recovery.

BaaS - Complete Backup to the Cloud

Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a complete data protection solution where all of your backup data is stored in the cloud.  It may leverage an on-premise appliance as a local cache for backup data, but the primary location for backup data is in the cloud.  All that's required is an Internet connection - no onsite equipment or staff is necessary. 

For small businesses that don't have many (if any) IT staffs, BaaS is popular for its ease of use and affordability.  What it lacks is the local recovery performance and the more advanced backup and recovery features that an on-premise data protection solution can offer. 

RaaS - Hybrid Backup to the Cloud

Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) offers a hybrid approach to cloud-based backup and recovery protection.  With RaaS, you get an on-premise data protection solution combined with integrated cloud storage for long-term retention.  RaaS complements your on-premise data protection with offsite storage of your backup recovery points, as a protection against disasters. 

Using RaaS, you can extend your onsite data protection plans to replicate (copy) your backups to an offsite cloud location.  Data replication is automated and made secure with end-to-end encryption.  When necessary, backup data can be restored from the cloud directly - a much simpler approach to having tapes retrieved from a warehouse.

DRaaS - Full Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is an extension of RaaS and offers the ability to run backup images of Windows and Linux virtual machines "in the cloud," without having to copy them back to the primary data center.  The net result is a reliable and affordable off-site disaster service capable of supporting your critical applications, in the event your primary data center goes down due to a disaster.

Cloud-based backup and recovery is truly the most exciting extension to data protection offerings in 2016.  With the help of a cloud-based disaster recovery services, you can access affordable cloud resources to spin up virtual machines for application failover and development/testing.  With only a few clicks, you can enable virtual environments "on-the-fly" without incurring the cost of racking your own equipment. 

Cloud backup and recovery is here to stay and grow over time as one of the best ways to protect one's business.

To learn more about the rise of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, please visit www.arcserve.com 

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About the Author

Christophe Bertrand, Vice President of Product Marketing, Arcserve

Christophe Bertrand is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Arcserve, a leading provider of data protection and recovery solutions that provide organizations with the assurance that they can recover their data and applications when needed.

He joined the Data Management division at CA Technologies, now the independent Arcserve company, to lead Worldwide Product Marketing and launch the award-winning Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution.

Christophe brings over 20 years of marketing experience in services, software and high-end systems, as well as a deep passion for the disciplines of product marketing and product launches.

He has spent most of his career in the data storage and data protection space with companies such as Legato Systems (now EMC), VERITAS (now Symantec), Maxtor, Hitachi Data Systems and most recently DataDirect Networks where he led product, channel and vertical marketing.

At Hitachi, Christophe enjoyed a decade-long tenure overseeing products within its storage management and replication technology portfolio, and the core HDS product hardware solution set. 

He has acquired extensive global experience built on many hours in the field with analysts, customers, channel and alliance partners.  He has also spoken publicly at many customer and industry events, in English, French and Spanish.