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6 best practices for choosing a cloud backup provider

By W. Curtis Preston and Nick Cavalancia

Unless you have a specific need to keep backups on premises, you should be looking at cloud backup by now. However, choosing the right backup vendor for your organization is no easy matter.

To that end, this article will share best practices to help you evaluate cloud backup services. But before we can dive into what to look for, let's first level set what it means when you're thinking cloud backup.

The real-world definition of 'cloud backup'

There are so many variants of what's being offered as "cloud backup" that an important first step is understanding just what is meant by that term. Generally, cloud backup falls into four categories:

The backup vendor landscape

Today, there are far too many backup vendors to choose from and certainly too many to list in this article. However, cloud vendors fit into these distinct buckets:

Cloud backup best practices to guide vendor selection

There's a lot of overlap in backup vendor offerings, so it's important to be strategic about creating your list of vendors to research. To that end, here are six best practices that can help identify the right cloud backup vendor for you.

  1. Understand the vendor's backup offerings. What exactly are you trying to back up? The list can include on-premises systems and data, cloud-based virtual machines, specific client operating systems, cloud application data and more. Be sure to inquire whether the vendor you're looking at supports the unique backup needs of your organization.
  2. Ask about seeding methods. Installing backup software and starting an initial backup -- the seed -- does nothing for you until there's a complete copy in your backup storage. Some vendors seed via your internet connection, some will ship you a physical drive, and others seed locally and replicate the copy to the cloud. Find out which methods your potential cloud vendors use, and research the pros, cons and speed of each.
  3. Research vendor's storage locations. A few issues are involved with this one. First, you don't want data stored in locations where a disaster, such as an earthquake, will affect both you and your off-site backup storage. Second, you don't want backups so far away that backups and recovery will be too slow. Third, you may want your data stored in a part of the world that does not permit extradition of the data to another country. You need to find the right mix based on the importance of each of these factors.
  4. Ask about data security methods. Every backup vendor encrypts data, but be sure to ask what encryption level is used. It should be a minimum of AES 256-bit. Also, ask who has access to the private decryption key. In some cases, both you and the backup vendor have it, and, in other cases, only you do. The latter offers more security, as you'll always be aware of a restore, but the former allows faster recovery time by a managed backup vendor.
  5. Ask about compliance support. Vendors should be compliant with standard privacy and security protections. However, if there are specific compliance mandates your organization needs to adhere to that involve backups or archives, find out exactly how the vendor meets the specific mandate.
  6. Learn the ins and outs of pricing. Smaller vendors can offer both backup software and storage at a simple cost per gigabyte price. Larger vendors can get somewhat complicated with you needing to pay basic storage costs plus ingress, egress, deletion, retrieval and query fees, making it nearly impossible to easily calculate a predictable monthly cost. Be sure to ask and get a clear, understandable answer.

Getting your cloud backup vendor right

Successful cloud backup starts with the right vendor choice. And yet, there is no-one-size-fits-all answer. For some organizations, a commodity mega-cloud vendor is the perfect choice. For others, the hands-on assistance from an expert provider sounds really good. The answer of what's the perfect cloud backup vendor for your organization lies in getting clear on what your organization needs and whether the cloud vendor can deliver that.

By using the best practices above, you'll uncover additional concerns you may have and learn which cloud backup provider is right for you.

12 Jul 2019

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