It’s not only essential that organizations backup their mission critical data, but that they are able to reliably recover it in an acceptable timeframe. According to DTI/PricewaterhouseCoopers, seven out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.

Backing up to tape and using a 3^rd party to send those tapes to a secure off site location has historically been the solution to that business problem. Although that was the best solution our industry could deliver for a number of years it has its’ fair share of challenges. In fact, numerous statistics have been cited that restoration of data from tape is far from a foregone conclusion. Online Cloud Backup is not only a viable replacement for the archaic tape process, but it has a significantly higher probability of data restoration and a much improved recovery time.

According to a Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup / Recovery Report, by 2014, at least 30% of organizations will have changed backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability.

Cloud backup solutions typically utilize the internet to securely transmit a backup of your data in an encrypted format to a secure off-site datacenter where your organizations data is stored on large redundant servers and storage arrays. The recovery point and recovery time objectives for the different data sets are typically configured through a client, giving your organization the same flexibility as with a traditional on-site tape solution. Unlike with tape however, no onetime hardware purchases or expensive maintenance contracts are required, rather a monthly fee is charged by the 3^rd party based upon the actual data storage amount your organization has used for that given month.

A number of factors have made online backup a practical possibility; not only has the price of transport, bandwidth and hard disk reduced significantly since we first started using tape, but the large capacities now available have made it very easy to transmit and store the data rather than having to physically transport tape media.  Lastly the management capabilities and level of sophistication provided by the cloud backup software has increased greatly.

DataVaulting, the Datotel Online Cloud Backup platform comprises of an appliance that plugs into your network at each of your locations. After the initial configuration and set up, that backup data is compressed, de-duplicated and transmitted securely on a regular basis to our St Louis datacenter where it can also be replicated to our Chicago facility for increased geographic redundancy. Our platform is hardware independent giving our clients the ability to put in place a data recovery solution designed to protect their entire organization from servers through, laptops and more recently even iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices.

@ddbrown