How to Choose Between Cloud Backup Solutions

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for today’s enterprises, with teams hoping to benefit from the cloud’s speed, efficiency, and scalability. Organizations are now hosting most or all of their mission-critical data in the cloud, creating a pressing need for cloud backup solutions that can do everything from protecting data in the cloud to providing full visibility into policies and backup snapshots. So how do you go about choosing the best cloud backup solution for those needs?

There is no simple answer, mainly because you can’t boil down cloud backup solutions to just one or two primary characteristics. Here are five of the most important aspects to consider when weighing your options for a cloud backup provider.

5 Considerations When Choosing a Cloud Backup Solution

Management

Many cloud backup users tend to assume that the cloud architecture will make the backup management process easier, but it’s never a given. Aside from the actual managing of the backups (scheduling, running recovery tests, etc.), you still have to account for the planning of data usage, upgrades, patching, and security.

Simplicity and usability are key, so it’s best to avoid products with multiple management consoles or require extra hardware.

Instead, opt for a single solution backup service with an intuitive interface that provides clear visibility into all the processes you are responsible for while eliminating any guesswork and manual processes when possible.

Scale

Cloud architecture provides enterprises with a virtually limitless supply of storage and processing resources, but not every backup solution finds ways to leverage these abilities fully. And then there’s the guesswork involved with forecasting compute usage and storage demand, which can easily lead to over-provisioning or under-provisioning. The former can cause you to spend too much, while the latter can result in performance bottlenecks, gaps in data protection, and compromised recoveries.

Seek out a cloud-native, serverless backup solution that can quickly scale with increasing storage demands while removing any need to forecast future usage. Problem solved.

Compliance

Today’s compliance landscape is complicated and fluid due to the emerging location-specific laws regarding user data retention within certain jurisdictions. In simpler terms, there’s a lot at stake, and you have to be sure you’re in compliance with everything from these data privacy laws to proving the security and frequency of your backup during insurance audits.

The key to meeting compliance is three-fold: understanding your specific compliance requirements, having clear visibility into your compliance status, and rock-solid data security.

It’s best to choose a cloud backup solution that will offer a single view into your compliance status, notify you when backups are out of compliance, and provide features that can quickly and easily prove compliance in the event of an audit by pulling specific, relevant data. Your cloud backup solution should also be able to store backups outside of production environments and provide end-to-end encryption to meet compliance security requirements.

Security

Securing customer data and protecting it from threats like ransomware is paramount—but far from simple. Data security typically involves complicated decisions made across multiple cloud infrastructure resources. And you have to get all of them right. Not only do you have to meet data governance requirements related to security (such as ISO/IEC 27001, SSAE 18, HIPAA, and PCI), you also have to frequently manage and update access rights while ensuring there are no gaps anywhere.

Do not overlook this aspect! Choose a cloud backup solutions vendor with a security-first mindset that can align with your security needs, rather than one that merely offers it as an add-on. This includes the ability to store backups in an air-gap and away from primary accounts, end-to-end encryption on all backups, and the ability to change keys when desired.

Cost

The cloud is supposed to offer cost-efficiencies when it comes to backup and storage, but choosing the wrong cloud backup solution can result in the opposite. This is often due to surprise charges that you did not anticipate, such as egress, bandwidth, and storage. There’s also the issue of racking up expenses from inefficient creation, storage, and usage of snapshots. To make matters worse, many vendors offer confusing pricing models that are overly complicated, making it hard to predict what the TCO should even be.

You can avoid excessive cloud spending by choosing a cloud backup vendor with a simple, straightforward pricing model that clearly spells out the ongoing charges.

Clumio: The Superior Cloud Backup Solution

Clumio is a secure AWS cloud backup solution for enterprises that removes the complexity of software and hardware management while leveraging the cloud’s scale, economics, and elasticity.

More importantly, Clumio addresses all the aforementioned cloud backup aspects of management, scale, compliance, security, and cost by offering features such as:

• Turnkey ransomware protection via Air-gapped storage of backups away from production accounts
• Clear visibility and management of compliance requirements
• End-to-end encryption of backups
• The use of cloud-scale to support any size environment
• Insights that provide recommendations for optimizing AWS backups
• Cost analyzer to help reduce unnecessary cloud spend

Ready to give Clumio a try? You can be up and running with Clumio in just 15 minutes—no new hardware or software required. Click here to learn how you can test drive Clumio free for 14 days, or contact us today to schedule a personalized demo.