Data is the fuel that businesses run on. For nearly every business, the data generated from hundreds, if not thousands of endpoints, is multiplying with each passing day. The ability to back up all data securely, access it with ease, and restore it in the event of a data loss, ransomware attack or disaster, sets successful businesses apart from the rest.
In earning this crucial advantage, businesses have turned to cloud storage as a safe haven for their data. A 2019 survey conducted by Unitrends on the adoption of cloud storage found that 60% of responding organizations were using multiple clouds for data storage and protection. A method that is gaining popularity is direct-to-cloud backup.
Utilizing direct-to-cloud backup involves moving files and data directly from an endpoint (laptop, PC, workstation) to the cloud with no appliance or local storage setup on-premises.
Here are three major reasons why direct-to-cloud backup works best for some use cases:
Backup for Those on the Move
Businesses today are less likely to be constrained to a particular location or office. More often than not, end users (your employees or customers) are on the move, with a need to stay connected without fail. Direct-to-cloud backup ensures their data is backed up and remains accessible, even if they do not touch base at the home office.
Quick and Flexible Recovery for Files
When backing up servers, applications, or large data sets to the cloud, recovering that data from the cloud can be slow, depending on your bandwidth, which is why a hybrid cloud backup solution can work best for this use case. But the data created and saved to endpoints by most end users is typically of a size that can be recovered quickly from the cloud. Especially if IT can use a well-designed management console, like Unitrends Cloud Backup, to grab and restore any file quickly. Additionally, the right direct-to-cloud backup solution lets IT restore the files to another machine, so if your end user loses or damages their laptop, IT can easily transfer their data to a new device.
Simple Deployment and Ease-Of-Use
Due to their busy schedules and tight budgets, IT teams need an easy and simple solution to back up their end users’ data. What they don’t need? Wasting time by selecting what files to back up or not in an attempt to save on cloud storage costs. This effort diverts valuable IT time away from important tasks and can often result in discovering too late that the files your end user needs to recover are not actually backed up.
However, with each license of Unitrends Cloud Backup, you not only experience the ease of using the cloud for every endpoint, you also get enough cloud storage to protect up to 1TB of data with 30 days of retention for each workstation, thereby ensuring that even the large endpoints are covered. No more hassles over choosing what to backup since the average data size of a laptop is less than 100GB.
Most importantly, you won’t have to shell out a penny to access or restore your data.
While direct-to-cloud backup makes data backup easier for endpoints, it may not suit every type of data that needs to be protected. In reality, most organizations have a mix of data protection needs but a limited IT staff and budget to accomplish it all. Servers and applications critical to the business may need hybrid cloud backup, which combines local backup for on-site recovery that isn’t limited by bandwidth, and secondary cloud backups for disaster recovery and archiving.
Read the next post to learn how hybrid cloud backup compares to direct-to-cloud backup and how to select the right data protection solutions for your recovery objectives, SLAs and budget.
