Storage in Cloud often refers to back-up which is fair as it accounts for a large proportion of Cloud-storage. Off-site backup is even bigger, but most of this category refers to physical transportation and secure storage of back-up tapes, which is irrelevant to Cloud. However off-site back-up in Cloud is both relevant and growing.

Supply

Back-up as a Cloud service has evolved over many years into robust offerings catering from consumers up to enterprise IT. In Europe many providers have been established as national entities catering for local customers. The local model has its benefits specifically when it can leverage a brand of an established hosting company, but there are clearly larger entities operating across numerous countries.

Demand

Outsourcing back-up becomes a tempting proposition and even desirable when it solves the off-site problem. To consumers this consideration is surprisingly often of secondary importance, even though it ought to be a vital. IT professionals, on the other hand, will be only too aware of the requirement of the physical separation between of the main IT-site and a back-up location. Which explained why IT decision makers embraced the concept of spending money on third party providers looking after their data.
Back-up in this context most often refers to disaster recovery/business continuity (DR, BC), ie. the ability to recreate the data on a replacement IT infrastructure should the original IT environment be rendered useless or disappear. Although other permutations such as archiving do exist.

The basics are unchanged

The fundamentals in back-up and restore remain unchanged:

  • It is all about restore, ie. restore has to be practical and relevant to the business
  • No single points of failure are allowed
  • Testing is critical
  • Tasks can be outsourced, but fundamental decisions cannot be

Even a moderately advanced consumer needs to think their back-up set-up through. Businesses on the other hand, irrespective of size, need to invest in planning their DR/BC efforts whether in-house or outsourced.

In addition to the fundamental considerations regarding recovery point objectives (RPO), recovery time objectives (RTO) and data protection windows (DPW) third party outsourcing providers pose various questions.

Such as:

  • Where is back-up IP located?
  • Where and how is control located?
  • Where and how are the external interfaces working?
  • What about encryption and performance?

The Cloud storage providers see back-up as a beachhead in supplying more sophisticated Cloud services. Meanwhile, getting more companies to consider Cloud based back-up is the task ahead.

More posts are planned, watch this space.