Cloud backup 2024

Whether it's through attack or error, your business data is always at risk. Dave Mitchell explains how cloud services can add extra protection and puts four contenders to the test

- Dave Mitchell

Businesses are creating data at unprecedented rates, and those that don’t protect it are taking some appalling risks and putting their very survival on the line. There’s no such thing as “safe data”, so it’s essential that businesses implement a sound backup strategy to protect against unforeseen disasters.

The number of threats faced by businesses are increasing just as fast. Data breaches and ransomware attacks are always on the rise, but so are environmental disasters and crimes such as theft and burglary.

Backup doesn’t need to be challenging, and the cloud makes it even easier as it provides an ideal location for essential off-site storage. The best data protection strategies use a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud backup, which ensures that multiple copies of your data are maintained in different physical locations so it’s always available for recovery.

The good news for SMBs is there are plenty of affordable solutions on themarket with integrated support for on-premises and cloud backup. You don’t even need to worry about sourcing cloud storage as we’ve chosen solutions from Acronis, Barracuda, Commvault and IDrive that all include it in the price.

Parts of the process

A data protection strategy that relies heavily on human intervention is guaranteed to fail. All backup tasks must be fully automated and the four products in our guide will do this for you as they have built-in schedulers that automatically run jobs regularly.

Backup frequency will be determined by your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). RTOs determine the amount of time your business can comfortably survive without access to its systems, applications and data, while RPOs define the amount of data loss your business can tolerate.