Some companies are still using tape for backup because it seems like an economical and reliable solution. Tape has a lower cost per gigabyte of storage than disk. It is also cheaper to store because it doesn’t require hardware for storage. Any back room or closet will do. Tape’s long shelf life makes it ideal for archiving, which is required by many compliance regulations.
Tapes are also durable. If the head or case gets damaged, the media remains unharmed. Tapes are stored offline, so they escape harm if you suffer a data breach or outage.
These advantages don’t tell the whole story. When your business uses tape, storage and recovery can be a hassle. As an alternative, the cloud provides the security, reliability, and cost-efficiency your business needs in a backup solution.
The Other Face of Tape Backup
There is a Mr. Hyde to tape’s Dr. Jekyll. Managing tape can be a trial. The tapes can pile up and take up all your physical storage space. Some IT leaders need to transport the tapes around in their cars. Sure, you can scale by buying more tapes. But where do you put them all? And when you need to restore, you need to scramble to find the correct tape.
The portability of tapes makes them easy to transport but it also makes them easy to steal or misplace. In 2015, McLean Hospital reported losing 4 backup tapes containing data connected to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC). The hospital lacked formal policies for storing and handling the tapes. To make matters worse, these tapes were not encrypted, risking the exposure of sensitive patient data.
Recovery from tapes is extremely slow. Using tape for backup makes it difficult to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). First, you need to find the right tape. Then, you need to locate the right information. Information on tapes needs to be accessed sequentially, so you must start at the beginning of the tape and scan meticulously to find what you are looking for.
While tape can be durable, it can also degrade. The magnetic tape head wears out with use. Information can easily be erased by electromagnetic charges. Heat, moisture, and dust all affect the integrity of magnetic tapes.
Cloud Backup to the Rescue
Cloud offers all the advantages of tape backup and more. Cloud backup and recovery allows you to move your data off-site so it is safe from any outage or breach affecting your main data center.
With the cloud, your backup can scale with your workload needs, and you pay only for what you need, when you need it. Off-site recovery is possible without the infrastructure expenses of a colocation. Hybrid cloud offers the on-site infrastructure you need for production, along with off-site resources for backup and recovery.
Unlike backing up with tape, cloud backup allows for speedy recovery.
Finding the Right Cloud Backup
Everybody has some skin in the cloud game these days, but the market can be hard to navigate. When choosing a cloud provider, you need to ensure they offer robust backup services that meet your RTOs and RPOs.
ABC Services fits the bill by providing EVault. EVault offers the ease and simplicity of cloud and hybrid backup services in lieu of the cost and challenges of tape handling, tape management, and file retrieval and restore. All backups are encrypted and replicated to a second data center so your data is always safe and available.
Precision recovery allows you to return to a specific point in time before data loss occurred. Backups are automatic so you don’t need to worry about remembering to make regular backups.
Find out more about EVault cloud backup from the experts at ABC Services.