Business and Technology are Migrating to the Cloud – Part 3: Online Backup is Here and Now

July 6, 2016 – My first personal computer consisted of two floppy disk drives, an A: and B: A: ran my applications and B: stored my data. That was 1981. By the end of the decade I was using computers with hard disk drives and floppy disk backups doing the grandfather, father, son weekly routine to ensure I didn’t lose any data. A decade later I was backing up my and other computer systems to large arrays of tape and hard drives called RAIDS. Today my desktop has 2 one terabyte hard drives and a one terabyte USB hard drive and an assortment of smaller portable storage devices. I also backup some of my files to Google Drive and a similar Microsoft cloud service. All this redundancy means nothing I ever write and save is lost. But in the past and even in businesses today that is not the case.

Recently I received an email about cloud backup. It rated 36 different cloud solutions in the industry and settled on IDrive as its pick. IDrive gives a subscriber one year of 1 terabyte backup to its secure data storage for $17.38 U.S. Try it for free with its 5 gigabyte offer.

The advantages outweigh most concerns. Small businesses don’t have to expend a lot of money on internal IT resources. The cloud services provided by IDrive can backup all personal computing and mobile devices. IDrive offers online file synchronization, social media backup and management software for coordinating storage of every company device regardless of operating system.

So why should you consider the cloud for backup? If you have not thought about it before here are seven reasons to consider.

1. A cloud backup system allows for access from anywhere. This is good news if your computer crashes, because having backup files stored to a cloud system means you are able to access files from other devices that connect to the cloud.
2. Internet storage is virtually limitless. If your business has lots of information to store, cloud services give you endless expandability. Where you are handling big files that are multiple gigabytes in size a high-speed Internet connection will give you the feeds and speeds needed to ensure quick access.
3. Online storage is surprisingly safe and secure. Many cloud backup vendors offer copying services with redundancy, that is your files are distributed to many locations and not just a single data centre. This ensures that even if the vendor’s operations experiences a major problem at one location, the redundancy of the cloud services means your data can be recovered from more than one locale.
4. Cloud services are cost effective. In fact cloud backup is dirt cheap. Backup of a terabyte for less than $20 U.S. per year is just too good a deal to miss.
5. Cloud services provide automated data backup systems. In fact a number of vendors automatically backup data as you work so you never lose a file and if you forget to save it the cloud backup ensures you never lose it.
6. As good as hard drive technology is eventually it begins to show its age. I recently discovered bad sectors on the hard drive of one of my PCs and it created real headaches for me. It turned out it wasn’t worth repairing and if I hadn’t had backups I would have lost some of my data. With cloud services for backup your worst case scenario would involve an Internet outage. This could be caused by local failure of a router or by a more remote failure at the Internet service provider‘s site. But replacing a router is cheap and most Internet service providers offer service level guarantees to ensure outages are infrequent.
7. Reputable online backup services provide high levels of support and security. Their business is keeping your information secure as well as assisting you in finding it.

In our next chapter on this subject we’ll talk about the migration of applications from internal servers and desktops to the cloud and how these services are changing the way businesses operate.