Cloud Backup - Outsource your Data Recovery

Outsource your Recovery: Big Mistake or Best Move?

You already trust the planning, installation, configuration and support of your company’s servers, data and workstations to a trusted provider (hopefully us) and now you’re thinking about what to do with recovery.

You probably have a pretty good handle on it – you’ve invested in a tape system, have a tape rotation schedule, even use off-site tape storage. But you keep hearing about outsourcing and wonder what all the noise is about. Providers like us are pushing cloud-based backup & recovery – some (like us) even use terms like “hybrid cloud” and this is all very new and uncertain.

Let’s put some framework around the concept of hybrid cloud backup & recovery to clear things up. Using the cloud for recovery simply means backups are sent to the cloud using block-level changes and de-duplication technology to ensure the highest ability to recover with the smallest bandwidth used.

The hybrid in hybrid cloud means maintaining local storage as a backup device to ensure the fastest recovery when the cloud isn’t available or isn’t the fastest option. So what you have in place is backups that are made to the cloud, synced with local storage and provide you with a highly available, redundant and fast recovery solution.

Depending on where you sit on the org chart, you’re already jumping to either “this needs to make financial sense” or “this needs to be a better recovery solution than what I have today”. Let’s address both (in no particular order of priority).

Outsourcing: Financially Sensible

Today, your recovery solution is a number of capitol expenditures that need to be amortized over years because they cost so much. There is little in the way of redundancy (again, because of the cost), so financially, you’re spending a lot up front, and are putting the business at financial risk in the long run should a major problem arise that requires a serious recovery.

Outsourcing to a hybrid cloud recovery service first off moves your spend to operating expenses that can be far more easily budgeted for as the company grows. Cash flow evens out, is a lower overall cost than what’s being spent today and the expense aligns with growth. Outsourcing (specifically to a hybrid cloud solution) also means having a far more redundant solution in place that can recover servers, data, and workstations to any location, anytime, anywhere. That means in the face of a disaster, the company can resume operations more easily and quickly, lowering the financial risk of a disaster.

Outsourcing: Better Recovery

As it’s already been pointed out, outsourcing recovery to a hybrid cloud recovery service gives you access to world-class highly available, highly redundant data centers to securely store backups of your data and devices. Local backup storage (by means of an on-premise NAS device) ensures that you have recoverability 100% of the time. Backups are faster, data is more durable, and recovery is more assured – whether a simple restore of a file or a bare metal recovery of a server to a cold site. You simply can’t lose.

Definitely the Best Move

Outsourcing recovery to a provider that already has eyes watching the health of your IT operations just makes sense. It allows those that have a vested interest in getting you running to keep you running. It also lowers the overall company expense of recovery while providing a better service with greater (and faster) ability to get back to business.