Remote Backup – Advantages and Disadvantages

Nothing is worse than the loss of data which may involve years of hard-work, critical and confidential information about the customers and business clients among other important data. It is but a beginning of much larger problems waiting in the queue. We cannot stress enough on the gravity of the situation. 

Although we discussed about the need and the usefulness the cloud based backup option in our previous post, we also need to look in to the Advantages and Disadvantages of the remote backup (cloud backup).  

Here are some of the key benefits of remote backup: 

1. Cost Effective  

Remote back minimizes cost by eliminating the hardware and software requirements, its maintenance and upgradation to scale the storage and processing speed from time to time. With the pay-as-you model, the company may only bear costs of of what they have used. 

2. Eliminate risk 

Since the complete backup process is managed by the vendor and not the customer, the company will not have to deal with risks involved in any part of the process. 

3. Ease of Use 

No one will argue on the fact that cloud backup solutions usually have a very easy to understand interface and use web based tool which the customer can get used to in no time. Since the whole process is automated, no intervention is required from anyone to even monitor it. 

4. Flexibility & Scalability 

Vendors offer elastic storage, to help companies accommodate data for present and future needs. By changing the plan (selecting the higher plan) and with some minor adjustments in the tool, customers can very easily scale the storage without touching the data. 

5. Incremental Backup 

Vendors also have a plan of incremental backup to save on the customers bandwidth. The remote backup tool only analyses and backs up the new data instead of starting the backup process from the beginning. 

Photo Credit – Mekuria Getinet/Flickr

Recommended : Top 10 Cloud Backup vendors to help you backup data

Here are some of the disadvantages of remote backup: 

1. Security 

The debate circling security in the cloud is still strong as ever. No one can deny the apprehensions that many companies usually have while relying on a cloud vendor for the safe-keeping of their most crucial and confidential data. Though the backup is encrypted, it would be wiser to check if their employees have any access to your data. 

2. Vendor issues 

What would happen to your data if the remote backup vendor goes out of business? It is advisable to not overlook this matter while signing up with them.  

3. Recovery and Restore

Recovering the backed up data may take longer depending on the bandwidth and the size of the data. Restoring services completely may take longer. 

Conclusion

The pros and cons of the remote backup solution are more or less the same as the ones found in cloud computing in general. You may speak with cloud experts and if possible other businesses about how they manage their backup, get more views, opinions, suggestions on remote backup vendors and most importantly (if possible) the quality of their service and response time in the hour of need. 

Feature Photo Credit – Mario Goebbels/Flickr