Cloud Backup Software

Having cloud backup software provides a convenient way to protect and secure data and applications from electronic devices that are generating huge amounts of data that could have some form of intrinsic value to the business and could be backed up to the cloud.

Backup should be something that users do not have to worry about, and the business should be able to backup the information that matters to them securely to a cloud location. Cloud backup should backup at a scheduled time every day, or when a suitable network connection is available.

Cloud Backup Software should consume minimal processing power and memory resources so that it doesn't interfere with the user's day-to-day activities. For a mobile worker, this type of cloud service has been available for a relatively long time — it gets more difficult when you need to backup a server's operating system and applications, as we are now looking at generating far more data, and our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) are now called into question.

Historical Backup

Up until the mid-2000s, most backups used tapes — DAT, AIT, 1/4″, 8mm Exabyte, DLT and LTO. One by one they disappeared and left LTO as the final tape backup technology of choice. The backup of servers was done locally, normally once a day, to a tape drive, autoloader or library, and these backup tapes were collected and taken off-site. If you needed to restore data, then the tape was recalled.

Next, companies started to have DR sites, and this ushered in a new era of data replication from D2D (disk to disk). These D2D devices mimic a tape library, so the backup software believes it is writing to a tape. The backup data is then replicated across the WAN to the DR site. Over time these D2D devices included data deduplication and became backup devices in their own right. The backup software vendors started to add deduplication, replication and compression to their software as servers became more powerful, using multicore and socket processors that could now backup to a RAID or JBOD and replicate the data to the DR site.

Companies then needed to backup continually, rather than once a night, as data was being created from home on mobile devices. In 2006, Amazon launched S3, the world's first cloud storage solution that has since become the largest provider of cloud services globally. Gradually companies started to use Amazon S3 for backup, and today there are numerous companies and organisations providing cloud backup services.

Server Cloud Backup

A server today, whether physical or virtual, typically has multiple terabytes attached in the form of disk storage or flash storage that run databases, applications, or store unstructured data. The bottleneck historically for backing up was the network — nowadays we have multiple ways of moving data around a network:

• 1/10/25/100 Gb Ethernet — CIFS, NFS, SMB, iSCSI
• 8/16/32/64 Gb Fibre Channel

So the problem of moving large volumes of data around a network has primarily gone away — the issue is the WAN infrastructure, which for most of the UK still relies on copper connections and is expensive to run, and this is where backup to the cloud starts to cause problems when backing up servers. Just to upload 5TB of data to the cloud would take 44 hours (providing you have the available pipe), and 10 hours to replicate over a 250Mbit connection.

This may be fine for file restores, but many companies have far more than 5TB, and the real problem arises when we have a server failure or data loss — this type of issue can take days to restore, compared to a local backup that could restore the lost information in hours.

Backup Service

We provide cloud backup software that protects all of the following systems and applications to the cloud:

• Microsoft Office 365 / Google G-Suite
• Multiple applications & operating systems including Microsoft, Linux and Apple
• Physical and virtual servers
• Providing complete ransomware protection

As explained above, server cloud backup could be problematic in the event of a disaster. We provide cloud backup solutions that initially backup to a local device, and this information is then replicated to the cloud periodically. Over a period of time, all of your server data will be replicated to the cloud and always in sync with your on-site backup. Should a disaster strike, you can restore locally — and if you lose a building, we can, for 30 days, spin up your applications in the cloud so that you can recover and rebuild your IT systems, or provide a disk drive containing your data.