Resilience and Continuity
Digital services are essential for every modern business, irrespective of the industry in which it operates or the number of people it employs. That means the tolerance for any kind of IT issue or full-blown outage is low, with even minor problems leading to lost revenue and reputational damage.
Online backup platforms can be the ideal way to counteract common problems that occur without warning, enabling you to ensure that your systems are resilient in the face of unforeseen disasters and that recovery is swift and comprehensive.
Fully managed cloud backup services allow you to offload mission-critical data to third party facilities, where it is stored and from where it can be retrieved in the event that on-site hardware fails or is otherwise compromised by circumstances beyond your control.
Security
Shouldering the burden of responsibility for providing security is difficult for many businesses, especially when internal resources might be stretched thin and the temptation to cut corners becomes too great to overcome. To counterbalance this, online backup provided by a dedicated hosting company will let you share the responsibility and commit to working with an organisation which can focus its efforts more keenly on the process of providing protection against cyber threats.
From end to end encryption to data centres which are endowed with personnel to ensure the physical security of hardware, a backup service can be a savvy investment for small and large businesses.
Cost Effectiveness
Cloud-hosted online backup is a fundamentally cost effective solution because of the scalability that it offers customers. Rather than requiring businesses to buy, host and update hardware themselves – with unused capacity going to waste outside of peak periods – an online backup alternative eliminates the expense and stress of taking the traditional route.
There are a range of other costs that can also be mitigated or removed altogether when you adopt online backup. When everything is managed by a third party, the payment process is simplified, which also means that there will be no nasty surprises further down the line.
Ease of Use and Accessibility
Speed, scalability and security are the calling cards of online backup solutions, but from a practical point of view one of the main benefits is the usability that is offered by modern packages.
Backups can be scheduled for convenient times so that work is not disrupted and data continuity is assured. You can even maintain multiple backup sets so that you have several options available as and when restoration becomes a necessity.
Businesses can also choose the degree of management which is offered by the provider, either opting for a fully managed experience that allows them to take a hands-off approach to their backup resources, or a non-managed service which gives businesses more autonomy and control.
Finally the end-user experience is enhanced thanks to slick interfaces which have shallow learning curves, along with the option to restore backups from any location, rather than being tied down to a single set of hardware. This level of intuitiveness is enhanced by the comprehensive support packages that providers offer their enterprise clients.
Sustainability
Many organisations are concerned about the environmental impact of their IT systems, looking to find ways to minimise their carbon footprint without compromising in other areas. This becomes difficult to achieve when taking the in-house approach to backup, as hardware not only has to be procured and powered, but must also be periodically repaired and replaced, resulting in a mountain of e-waste being generated over time.
Using an online backup solutionhelps to overcome this in a number of ways. For example, providers can offer cutting edge, high capacity storage which can cope with larger volumes of data without taking up the same amount of floor space or consuming as much energy as older on-site systems.
Data centres operated by cloud providers can also be optimised to run as efficiently as possible, since as with the other benefits mentioned earlier, there is the commercial incentive to do so.
These are just some of the benefits which might motivate businesses to choose online backup over in-house storage, but there are many more to discover once you start using modern services.
