6 Advantages of Data Backup and Recovery

Businesses spend a lot of time building their proprietary data and information. That information can often hold the key to a competitive advantage in the market. Data loss from threats or disasters can lead to upset customers, lost revenue, and potentially bankruptcy, e.g., more than 90 percent of companies without a disaster recovery plan who suffer a major disaster are out of business within one year. There are tremendous benefits of backup software in backing up your data that can save you time and help you retain your competitive advantage when facing a data loss or complication.

PeerSpot real users of backup and recovery software note the advantages of this type of solution to their IT Departments, management, and end users. Choosing the best backup software can provide you with a great safety net and the most benefits to your business. Benefits include:

1. Security. One of the most important aspects of data backup and recovery. As IT systems grow and integrate with one another, the number of potential threats increases to the information that a company holds. Maintaining a backup and recovery solution that has strong security is foremost when looking to protect and save data. A Senior Vice President at a medium-sized technology company notes how their backup and recovery software solution, Quorum OnQ, provides them security, “Quorum offers a very high level security environment for secondary data. Once data is in Quorum it is highly secured because the appliance is Linux-based. It does 256-bit AES encryption at rest and in motion.”
2. Ease of management. Especially when restoring lost data, which can be stressful and time-sensitive, ease of management creates consistencies in the processes for backing up data and information. It avoids end users backing up their own devices inconsistently and irregularly. Speedy data restorations help in expediting RPOs and RTOs across core applications. Jean Maurice Prosper, Chief Executive Officer at Nettobe Group, discusses how Barracuda Backup’s all-in-one management platform is easy and intuitive. Describing Barracuda, he says, “It is not difficult to configure a backup strategy, and manage our backup and restore. It is very user-friendly and made to ease the job of the administrator. We let the solution do the hard part.”
3. Reliable replication. Ensuring accurate replication of your data makes it disaster-proof. As Franklin, an Enterprise Network Engineer at a large healthcare company and Zerto user, explains, “It's almost like a tape recorder. You can rewind if you need to, if something bad happens. You can rewind the tape and your production begins where your tape left off.”
4. Maintain compliance standards. Collecting and preserving critical data through regular backup processes, IT departments can be more nimble when responding to requests from legal or auditors. Keith Alioto, Lead Storage Engineer at a large tech services company, talks about the compliance difference before and after deploying NetApp SnapCenter, “What we found was that we weren't backing up all of our SQL servers. We have now gotten to 100 percent compliance in backing up all of our data, and it's regularly measurable: daily, weekly, and monthly.”
5. Zero impact on performance. Most of the time users don’t realize that a solution for backups is running in the background. Fewer disruptions to users means more uptime. Benjamin R Roper, a Backup and Recovery Specialist at Parsons notes this benefit about his backup and recovery software, Metallic, “Its performance for both backup and recovery is amazing. It runs very well. I don't even know when it's running and that's true during the backups as well. It completes successfully and there's zero impact on the endpoints.”
6. Helps management control costs. A good backup and recovery software solution can reduce workforce overhead, leading to cost savings. A QA Engineer at a small tech vendor reflects on the savings seen in their company’s storage using Pure Storage FlashArray, “The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, e.g., our database team used to spend 93 days backing up and restoring databases. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.”

Benefits of Backup as a Service (BaaS)

Backup as a Service (BaaS) connects systems to an outside provider who provides private, public, or hybrid cloud services. This is instead of performing backups with a centralized, on-premise solution. Organizations may prefer to use a BaaS solution when they have outgrown their legacy storage backup, instead of doing a costly upgrade, or possible if they are lacking resources for an on-premise backup. Market trends for BaaS solutions suggest their popularity with a CAGR at 24 percent. Benefits of BaaS include:

• Quick access to data. This allows IT to easily retrieve files and information for end users. It also provides quick restoration of data when operating systems fail. If employees lose files from OSs, then companies want a solution that provides a single place to recover that data. According to Brijesh Parikh, Senior Architect, Cloud Infrastructure at a large tech vendor, Commvault provides that single solution to recover data. He gives the example, “Every once in a while, we receive requests for files or emails that people have lost and those files are in SharePoint or OneDrive. We have the ability to restore it within 30 days directly from the portal. But if it's beyond the 30 days, we use Commvault to restore data and that has worked absolutely fine.”
• Data accessibility. Whether connecting to your data from local areas or remote locations, you want to be able to access your data at any time. A System Manager at a large construction company using Rubrik discusses how Rubrik Polaris GPS improved their productivity by keeping data accessible, “Since acquiring Rubrik Polaris GPS, we have further increased our productivity by utilizing SLA policies that extend across clouds and multiple on-premises data centers.”
• Scalability. As companies scale, they look to enterprise software solutions to help them manage their infrastructure. Whereas, local backups are costly and difficult to scale up. Mostly, this is a result of their reliance on onsite storage. Calvin Engen, CTO at F12.net, had this situation as his company’s data centers continued to grow and they needed to be able to scale out their total protected VMs. Before Veeam, “We had backup infrastructure sprawl.” After deploying the solution, “Veeam was able to reduce our overall backup windows while reducing our dedicated backup infrastructure.” Based on Calvin’s review, this saves F12.net approximately $20,000 per year.