Business Cloud Backups Explained

It’s Sunday, and I’m looking outside at the gray ‘June gloom’ day in California, and I’m thinking about clouds. Why not talk about ‘cloud’ backups? Firstly, a quick update on the cloud. The term gets bandy about a lot these days, but mostly its a marketing term, that sounds better than ‘other’s servers hosted on the internet and you paying a monthly fee to use them’. Which is really what ‘cloud’ pertains to. Anyway for backups cloud refers to the ability to backup your data locally and then push that data continuously up to the cloud. For those of you using tape systems you accomplish close to the same thing by taking home tapes, or sending them to a storage facility like iron mountain. The difference is that unlike tapes, which may get taken offsite once a day ‘if you’re really on it’ cloud based backups are nearly continuous and this means all your data is up to the cloud throughout each and everyday. We use two products that work very well, Replay by a company called Appsense, and Sirus by a company called Datto. Both products work well and utilize the cloud fully. Next time I’ll discuss cloud backups and virtualization and the differentiation between backups and continuity.