Five Reasons Why Your Clients Should Move from Tape to Cloud Backup

Every day, more companies are adopting cloud-based data protection strategies—especially in the small and midsize market—for reasons related to costs, staffing and space. At the same time, tape is seen as a critical component in larger organizations, especially for archival data that is seldom accessed.

Many small and midsize companies are looking to eliminate or reduce their reliance on tape, often for economic efficiencies. Many organizations eliminate tape entirely, but others will rely on it for long-term data retention.

When talking with your clients about making the move to cloud backup, there are five motivations IT pros typically focus on:

1. DRaaS

Many cloud service providers are moving from providers of basic backup and storage services to more robust DR as a service (DRaaS) providers, offering emergency application hosting capabilities once delivered by a subscription data center operator or “hot site.” If a client’s continuity plan involves replication of virtual machines at the DRaaS site, it may make sense for them to have backup data already at that location, too.

2. Remote offices

Clouds can provide backup services in branch offices or remote offices where your clients don’t have tape technology or the staff to operate it correctly. And, remember, simply getting a copy of data outside the walls of a client’s facility helps to safeguard against loss or compromise.

3. Selective restore

Cloud-based backup and restore is far simpler for end users than tape, especially when recovering a single file or dataset that has been deleted or corrupted. A good cloud service will provide a listing of files, objects or datasets to the user, enabling selective on-the-fly restore.

4. No upfront hardware investment

In many cases, there is no upfront investment in hardware, though your clients may need to beef up metro or WAN connectivity.

5. Staff resources/training

A good cloud service provider can eliminate the need for your clients to train employees in tape operations or to pay maintenance on tape systems over time.

Not a Carbonite Partner?

With Carbonite EVault and Carbonite DoubleTake, partners have access to backup, high availability, migration and DRaaS solutions to protect the full spectrum of customer environments. Giving your customers a range of solutions enriches revenue opportunities and ensures you support 100% of their environment while still working with a single data protection vendor.

Learn more about EVault and DoubleTake from Carbonite and become a partner today.

Jon Whitlock is vice president of channel sales and marketing at Carbonite, a provider of cloud and hybrid data protection solutions for small-to-midsize businesses.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorship.