Prepare For The Future of Business Backup

Written by Steve Ross

As the size of data grows, existing backup strategies fall by the wayside. To ensure your business meets its changing security, storage and recovery needs, you’ll need to be aware of what the future holds…

If your business has been using the same backup methods for years, it’s probably time for an upgrade. Backup technology changes rapidly: where once low-capacity hard-drives and even USB memory sticks did the job, now businesses need to think much more carefully and creatively about how they back-up, restore and protect huge amounts of important data.

Today, backup data needs to be more than just secure, it needs to be mobile, flexible, and accessible on a variety of devices, in and out of the office. Cloud computing is playing a crucial role in helping businesses meet a wide variety of backup challenges but it isn’t a magic bullet.

The spectrum of threats to data changes constantly. Organisations which don’t modernise their backup aren’t just risking their security, but losing their competitive edge to those that do…

Backing-up, Looking Forward...

Don’t live in the past: you should assess the effectiveness of your backup strategy regularly. To help you ensure your IT infrastructure continues to meet its own backup challenges, we’ve taken a look at what the future holds…

Cost and Scalability:

One of the strengths of cloud services is scalability: depending on the service package you choose, you can integrate the cloud into your business simply as a storage medium (exporting data for protection and recovery in the event of loss) or, more comprehensively, as a working environment with real-time data editing and backup capabilities.

In the future…

This scalability will increase, meaning your cloud service will deliver more choice and a much greater adaptability for the backup requirements of your organisation.
The increased availability of cloud packages will mean a greater variety of financial choice: you’ll only pay for the backup you need.

Flexibility and Applications:

The backup capabilities of cloud applications are growing. Multiple new editorial and storage features are now available on cloud backup applications, including the ability to edit and collaborate on stored documents.

In the future…

Data will be handled and backed-up in the cloud to a far greater degree.
Data will converge on cloud applications, meaning it can be handled and protected in one place, rather than transferred across on and off-line locations.

Hybrid Adoption:

Hybrid solutions offer an advantage to businesses with complex backup needs: by retaining some data on-site, organisations benefit from the speed and security of their own networked hardware but by exporting other elements of their data to the cloud, they also enjoy the cost, capability and flexibility advantages of a virtual environment.

In the future…

The future of hybrid cloud deployment promises smoother integration, more choice and more connectivity.
Migrating and backing-up data between cloud environments will become easier and more efficient, especially as private cloud infrastructure packages become more financially attractive for SMEs.

Infrastructure and Archiving:

Backup data is often saved across multiple infrastructures – an advantage should one location lose power. For legal and regulatory reasons, long-term stored data often also requires its own dedicated infrastructure, separate to that used for day-to-day backup.

In the future…

Backup strategies will incorporate multiple infrastructures more efficiently- meaning data lost in one will be more quickly and easily recoverable in another.
Employees will be able to resume work on individual assignments quickly, rather than waiting for blocks of lost data to be recovered.
Better incorporation of separate infrastructures will also make long-term archiving easier and more affordable.

Is your current backup strategy doing its job? Are you prepared to protect your data in the future? Talk to Shackleton to explore your options…