Confidently Move Into Cloud-based Backup & Recovery

When I look at current IT trends and see companies like Microsoft getting into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud-based backup and recovery space, it demonstrates that most vendors see SaaS and cloud-based computing as a real marketplace on both the business or commercial sides of the house. It's evident that more end-users and businesses are increasingly looking at cloud-based backup services as one less thing they need to manage and that can be delivered as reliably and at a lower cost than what it costs them to do backup today.

Most businesses small and large have many IT needs but one that they continue to focus on as they move into a completely paperless world is data protection and, more specifically, data recovery. They know their current in-house backup and recovery processes are often less than adequate so when they ask hard questions like, "How long can I afford to be without my data?" and "What does losing that data mean to the company and the company's public reputation?", they don't like the answers. But what IT managers are surprised to learn as they look to move to a SaaS offering based on a cloud-based computing architecture for their backup and recovery services, they find there are many options from which to choose.

Yet one offering that has distinguished itself in the cloud-computing/SaaS market place is the Asigra Televaulting solution. Unlike most other offerings that are just starting out, Asigra has 20+ years in the business of outsourced data protection. Asigra already has established relationships with hundreds of managed service providers (MSPs) that each service tens if not hundreds of clients. All of these combined equal petabytes of backup data already under the management of Asigra Televaulting.

Further, by moving from an in-house backup and recovery environment into an Asigra powered cloud-based service model it reduces, if not altogether eliminates, some of the following costs associated with backup and recovery in an IT environment:

• Personnel costs. Moving backup administrators and operational people to other areas adds more value to the business while it eliminates the personnel costs associated with tape media management and movement.
• Infrastructure costs. By outsourcing backups and using a third-party provider, resources previously dedicated for backup can be redeployed for other purposes.. For instance, organizations can redeploy backup servers, retire, scale back or remove tape libraries and tape drives as well as the areas of the building used for physical tape storage areas
• Offsite storage costs. An aspect of data protection that organizations often do not think about is how much they pay monthly and annually to store tape cartridges offsite and the ongoing costs associated with moving these tape cartridges to and from these offsite facilities.

Asigra Televaulting coupled with its existing, extensive and established network of MSPs breaks the barrier to traditional backup and recovery approaches by keeping customers' risks low. Daily I hear from end-users that they are looking for more unique and cost-effective ways of running their IT business. Moving to an outsourced cloud-based computing backup model is a great way to reduce backup and recovery costs while at the same time creating a more reliable and robust backup and recovery infrastructure.