Backups as a Segue into the Cloud
If your organization is dipping your toe into cloud water, backing up into the cloud is a great first use case. If you’re trying to figure out what you should be doing with the cloud, but you’re not fully sold on moving workloads, start with backups.
One benefit of the cloud when it comes to cost is inexpensive storage. Depending on your retention policy and recovery needs, it can be extremely cost beneficial. The cheapest scenario would be if you were to write once, or store once without recovery. You won’t be charged much to put data out there, but cost increases when you need to recover it. Different cloud providers offer tiered pricing on storage: typically cold, frozen, medium and warm data; the colder the data, the less frequent you need access, and the cheaper to store it. Just keep in mind that it’s inexpensive unless you need to retrieve it frequently; it depends on how much data and what you’re doing with it.
A couple of benefits: first, you’re storing data off site. Also, you’re storing it someplace where someone else is maintaining it—both good things. Cloud providers have built-in redundancies and backups, so data is pretty secure. You’re not going to lose your data if you put it out there.
Cloud Backup Solutions with Retention Policy Options
Some solutions, like Rubrik, make it really easy to back up and archive off to cloud. For instance, the Rubik device, which is a box, or multiple boxes, gives you near line or close backup, which can be recovered right way, but it also integrates with cloud providers as a secondary backup. This gives you a way to offload what you’ve already backed up locally to a public cloud provider.
If you’re a VMware shop, and you’ve got a lot of capacity and workloads to backup, you can backup using Rubrik and set up the policy from Rubrik to decide what needs to stay close and what can be pushed off for longer term storage, plus set retention policies—sort of like software-defined backups.
If you’re looking for a way to initiate exploring the cloud, or you’re in search of an inexpensive storage solution for data you won’t need frequent access to, backing up to the cloud is a good option. You can do it manually to back things up to cloud, or, you can use a product like Rubrik that sits in the middle and handles it for you.
Need some pointers on backing up to the cloud? August Schell is here to help you learn more. Get in touch with us today, or call us at (301)-838-9470.