By Charles Wilson
Every organization is dealing with lots and lots and lots of data. How much?
On an average day, the human race creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. That’s 2.5 exabytes, or 2.5 billion gigabytes if you prefer.
Or you could say it’s simply a whole lot of data. With that much new data every day, companies look for cost-efficient ways of managing data and, most important, backing up that data. After all, the more data a company produces, the more it costs to back it up and recover it.
Along comes the cloud with help.
Just wait a minute. Isn’t the cloud the reason we are in this situation in the first place? Easy access to data produces more data? Well, you could make that case.
But the cloud actually has a vital technology that helps reduce the cost of managing and backing up data that companies produce: Backup as a Service (BaaS for short). All of the major cloud providers offer BaaS, but they also realize they need to offer even more. Along with backing up data, the providers offer solutions for storing the data and managing the data’s life cycle.
Let me explain how cloud-based BaaS can reduce the cost and time of managing your company’s backups.
One of the major innovations that the cloud provides is highly available, durable, cost-efficient storage. Storage is the major cost of backups. Yes I know licensing of software is a big cost of backups too, but there are many solutions that can reduce the licensing cost.
Amazon Web Services (AWS for short) released Simple Storage Service (S3 for short) a dozen years ago. S3 is a highly cost efficient, highly available object storage service. S3 provides a very low cost way of storing data in the cloud. IBM also provides object storage in the cloud to as part of its cloud service offerings.
Both of these providers boast 11 nines uptime (99.999999999%) for their storage services, along with extreme durability. Using these cloud providers’ cost-effective cloud storage services, LRS can design and implement a cost-effective backup storage solution.
Backing up is only half the issue, though. An effective backup solution needs to be able to recover the data that has been backed up. One of the ways cloud providers make restoring data easier is by providing a storage gateway. A storage gateway allows data to be cached and synced to the cloud based on a data life cycle.
What does that mean? It means that as you back up your data, the most recent data can remain available local to where it was backed up until a specific period of time. This allows for the most recent data to be recovered quickly and older data can be synced to the cloud and stored. Cloud solutions providers offer many different types of technologies to manage the data life cycle.
The last thing I need to mention is bandwidth. If backing up to the cloud has one possible “Achilles’ heel,” that heel is bandwidth, and it’s an important consideration when you’re thinking about moving your backups to the cloud.
In fact, you have to consider two distinct parts: the bandwidth needed to copy your backups to the cloud; and the bandwidth needed to recover your backups so you can restore the data that has been backed up.
Backup and restore using the cloud is obviously a bit complex, so it’s a god idea to check with an expert before diving in. Fill out the form below and let us know how we can help you back up to the cloud.
So you can begin managing all those quintillion bytes of data.
About the author
Charles Wilson is our Cloud Solutions Advisor. He has extensive experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions for companies in such industries as financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and retail. He holds certifications as an IBM Certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Technical Professional, and AWS TCO and Cloud Economics.