Eight Key Considerations When Planning Hybrid Cloud Backups

by Chris Preimesberger

Most organizations are still figuring out their cloud approach, which means they are considering deploying both public and private cloud implementations. So it makes sense that their cloud backup solution should provide cloud choice flexibility. Avoiding a lock-in to a vendor that only offers one cloud option ensures that your backup solution remains flexible to meet your businesses’ needs today and tomorrow.

IT knows all data isn’t created equal, but it’s taken a while for hybrid backup appliances to catch on. Smart appliances come with flexible storage-targeting capabilities that allow you to determine what data stays local or goes to the cloud. Since your most critical data is local, you can recover it over fast LAN connections, instead of over slower WAN connections to the cloud.

As IT looks to converge technologies, it’s important to choose a hybrid cloud backup solution that provides disaster recovery-as-a-service. DRaaS allows enterprises to instantly boot a protected server, providing access to systems and applications, ensuring that your business can keep running. Having this built into a single integrated backup streamlines your backup environment and is a critical component of a successful DR strategy.

A lot of backup vendors promise fast cloud backup and recovery time objective (RTO) benchmarks, but you’ll want to ask how they are delivering these fast speeds. Specifically, look for built-in WAN optimization, which optimizes network throughput of data between the appliance and the cloud. Hybrid backup solutions that use this technology will be able to deliver faster data transfer speeds from the cloud-connected backup appliance to the cloud.

Next-gen hybrid cloud backup solutions are using built-in cloud spillover (think cloud storage gateway technology), which automatically streams data from your on-premise device to the cloud and grows per your own data retention rules. Having the ability to determine what stays local while enabling a so-called bottomless cloud backup model (because everything is streaming there) is the catalyst that makes the cloud the center of your backup world.

Figuring out how to compare the costs of hybrid cloud backup solutions can be confounding. Some vendors offer hundreds of different models that require accurate sizing of the appliance. Plus, you need to factor these cost line items in order to get an apples-for-apples comparison for appliances, cloud storage, maintenance and support, among other things.

The reality is that most enterprises have heterogeneous environments to protect. So your hybrid cloud backup solution must support all your platforms and operating systems including physical and virtual servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

Managing your backup environment from one place or another is a necessity for the modern IT administrator. A centralized backup management dashboard makes it easy to manage multiple sites, monitor backups remotely and troubleshoot problems. It should also provide on-demand access without VPN or direct network access restrictions.