The cloud is a fantastic addition to the business environment that can aid your organization in achieving great things with your technology, but some professionals still feel that the cloud isn’t as secure as it needs to be, especially in light of the incredible number of threats loose on the Internet. However, contrary to popular belief, the cloud is a very effective way of storing data, particularly for your business’s data backups.

For example, let’s say that your business is storing your data backups on the cloud. Normally, there are two ways that you can store these backups: traditional tape backup, which is generally prone to user error and requires a significant amount of physical space; and cloud backup. Usually, a data backup would take up a ton of space on your in-house network. Furthermore, backing up your network and storing this information on the network is a rather precarious situation. If something were to happen to your network’s data, your backups would also be eliminated, and then you’d be in a seemingly impossible situation. This is the primary reason why your business needs to store your data off-site in a secure data center, in the cloud, or both.

Why Tape Backup is Lacking
Tape backups have been around for a long time, but are outdated and incompetent compared to new backup solutions for the small or medium-sized business. Since it depends on humans properly instigating it to work properly, tape is a manual backup solution. This means that if your staff forgets to set the backups to occur every night, there’s a chance that you could lose all of the day’s data due to negligence and user error. Furthermore, taking a backup using tape is a very resource-intensive procedure, which can’t be taken during ordinary work hours. These two traits combined make tape an unattractive backup process, especially compared to cloud backup.

Why the Cloud is Superior
Compared to ordinary tape backup, a cloud-based backup solution presents several desirable qualities. While tape backups must be performed manually, a cloud-based data backup solution is capable of automatically taking snapshots of your organization's data. This completely eliminates the possibility of user error or someone forgetting to take the backup. Plus, unlike tape backup, which takes backups of all data on the network, a cloud backup solution will track changes made to your files, and back up those which were changed. Thanks to this process, you put less strain on your systems, and you can take multiple backups throughout the day, rather than just one huge backup that causes downtime.

The cloud is great for storing data both efficiently and securely, but its main purpose is to make the data recovery process easier. Argentum IT’s Backup and Disaster Recovery solution is a device that can revolutionize the way your organization looks at data backup and disaster recovery. The BDR will take multiple backups throughout the workday, which are immediately deployed to either the cloud or an off-site data center. From there, it’s simply a matter of deploying the data remotely through the cloud. You’ll be back up and running before you know it! Plus, in case of a hardware failure or similar disaster, the BDR can act as your server while you figure out a more permanent solution to the hardware issue at hand.

For more information about our BDR solution, contact Argentum IT at (502) 473-6407.