The mistake many businesses make in considering IT a cost center rather than one of profit is that they look to save money at every turn and choose consumer products over commercial because of the price tag.
There is a reason these are two different classes of service and it always has to do with the level of service and features available. Following is a list of the five biggest differences between commercial and consumer brand cloud backups.
1. Restore speed
In the event of a complete drive failure where the entire drive needs to be recovered, one of the faster options is to do a system state recovery which allows the technician to restore the server’s operating system to a fully functional state with one simple restore. This avoids the long and arduous task of installing not only the operating system, but all the drivers and patches, from scratch. That is assuming the original media and license key is still available. Consumer grade cloud backups are only meant to backup files and do not allow for system state backups, taking recovering from a full system failure from a few hours to a few days and a few thousand dollars.
2. Compliance with security regulations
Consumer grade cloud backups were not designed to meet any security regulations of any sort. As such, if your company is required to meet certain regulations, your consumer grade cloud backup solution will need additional administration to meet HIPPA, FIPS or other compliance regulations. Commercial grade cloud backups will have backup processes, encryption, retention and private encryption keys in place to meet any regulatory compliance, as that what their customer base requires.
3. The security of your data
Consumer brands do not store complete copies of your data in redundant offsite locations. On the other hand, commercial brands will store your data in redundant physical data storage facilities, typically with military grade security in different geographical locations. It is part of their business continuity plan, which in turn becomes part of yours as well.
4. No storage limits for commercial grade
If you take a look at your consumer grade plan, you will likely see that there is a storage limit. But if no one is managing the backups, storage limitations can prevent backups. If you go over your storage quota, your data gets left behind. Storage limits are also tied to individual machines with consumer-grade solutions, meaning you’ll need to monitor storage allocation and usage for each system backing up data. Commercial cloud backups will not have any limits, thus reducing the amount of administration and removing the tough decisions of what is worth backing up and what is worth risking.
5. Service levels
Consumer grade cloud backups offer limited support and no administration services. Meaning, this managing backups will be one more thing on either your plate, or that of one of your employees whose job skills do not include disaster recovery or data backup management. When data loss takes place and a recovery is needed, there is often a lot of time spent on the phone with varied levels of success. With commercial grade cloud backups, since it is usually offered through and IT services provider, it is completely managed from setup, to administration, to test restores and disaster recovery. It is fully managed, taken care of and off your plate.
The type of cloud backup you decide on for your company should not be a short sighted money saving decision, because it can one day cost your business significantly more than the few hundred dollars you saved. Think carefully of the data you are protecting, the amount of time you can be without it, and the amount of resources you are willing to devote to it in the form of your staff’s time. If you work the math, you may find that commercial grade is worth every penny, and then some.
