With exponentially growing data, the risk of losing it is more than ever. Whether you lose heaps of data or just a chunk of it, data loss can cost businesses significant amount of money. Unfortunately, if a data breach happens, the reputation of the business can also go for a toss.
Managing and protecting your data backup is more important than ever. An efficient data backup and recovery software can make it possible to recover data within moments of an outage.
What is Data Backup and Recovery Software?
The data backup and recovery software can help you manage and access your data backups. You can take the backup of your data available on local computers and servers and store it on any medium. Most backup and recovery software support all possible backup mediums like tape, disk, and cloud.
The data can be backed up daily, monthly, or quarterly on any medium based on your business requirements. You can recover the data using the enterprise backup and recovery solution during natural disasters, fires, data breaches, and cyber-attacks. Thus, recovery and backup software can be a blessing during tragic data loss for enterprises that heavily rely on data.
Why Do Businesses Need Data Backup and Recovery Software?
Unexpectedly, the new paradigm shift of work-from-home has posed challenges for enterprises when managing data. It is easy to become the victim of cyberattacks, data theft, ransomware, catastrophe events, and whatnot with the increased use of insecure home networks and personal devices.
Basic protection like anti-virus software is not enough. Sometimes, even virtual private networks (VPN) don’t seem reliable for highly distributed environments. This makes it essential to update your data backup and recovery strategy before the worst nightmare occurs.
Benefits of Data Backup and Recovery Services
Whether it’s one bit or over gigabytes, the very thought that data is backed up and safe is peace of mind. In the long run, this can keep you recovery-ready and prove to be a long-term success in any data loss scenario. Some of the advantages of backup and recovery services are:
- You can retrieve specific files in seconds from any location, anytime. With backup and recovery software that facilitates faster restores and quick access to global files, the data recovery process becomes painless.
- Professional assistance for data recovery and backup can help you with strong security for your data. The software can get you started with error-free data versioning that cannot be done manually.
- Buying backup media yourself is expensive to maintain and complex to upgrade. You can consider outsourcing data backup and disaster recovery services. It will save time, unnecessary effort, and money.
- With backup software, you can encrypt sensitive business data with secured layers of data protection. It will ensure high confidentiality and data safety.
- With a backup & recovery service provider, you can manage all critical data in a better way. Consequently, this frees up your IT’s time to focus on other priority tasks and become super productive.
- Backup and security software helps you bring customers’ trust to your brand and business. Sometimes, data breaches and losses can make customers lose trust in your brand.
The benefits of backup and recovery software will want you to go for it pretty soon. But given the vendor hype, how would you figure out the best defense system against data loss? Well, choosing the right solution could be overwhelming. After all, you can easily get lost with glittery ratings and rave reviews of the enterprise backup and recovery solution. You can check out the tips to find the best data backup and recovery software for your organization.
What to Look For While Selecting Backup and Recovery Software?
Some tips can come in handy while finding data backup and recovery software for your business needs. Check out these 10 tips before choosing a backup and recovery service provider.
1. Pay-As-You-Go Model
The best backup and recovery software should be flexible enough to let you spend efficiently on storage space, data backup size, recovery, and security. Check if your backup solution provides you the ease to start and stop backup services at ease.
With the pay-as-you-go subscription, not only do you go realistic about your needs, but you can also avoid expenses that are not required at the moment.
2. Cost
Along with the pay-as-you-go model, it is equally important to look into the cost factor of the software you opt for. If the software is charging you way more than other vendors in the industry, you need to look for alternatives.
It is always better to go for the software that doesn’t charge you for the amount of data you back up. This can help you back up terabytes and petabytes of data without spending more.
3. Simplicity of Deployment
So, you have selected your backup and recovery partner? Great! Next, it becomes prudent to check for the simplicity of the software deployment. The reason is simple: complex configuration and ongoing management make the task of protecting data far more difficult. Therefore, the best choice would be simplified management with a single user interface that allows fast access to business-critical data.
Furthermore, if you can easily store, configure, and drive the backup processes for VMs, it can free up IT’s time.
4. Ease of Use
Ease of use is an important criterion when selecting backup and recovery software. If the dashboard is complex and has a steep learning curve, it will add up work for the IT team while maintaining the backup data. All in all, the software you select should be easy to deploy and use.
5. Supported Backup Mediums
In times of internet failure, there should be an offline backup medium you can rely on. Data backed up on the cloud can only be accessed online, and therefore, you need an onsite backup medium as a part of a business continuity plan.
A backup and recovery vendor that supports onsite and remote backups can be helpful in this case. The tape backup can serve the purpose of reliable primary backup. On the other hand, you can back up the data on the cloud for online and remote backup.
6. Support From the Vendor
How efficient are the service provider’s backup and restore services? Do they support the frequency level at which you need to back up files, folders, or servers? How flexible is the application (in case of execution of incremental or full backups) if the backup fails? Do they provide 24/7 support across all geo-locations? It is advisable to check all these parameters before finalizing the software.
The backup software provider should take care of data retention and ongoing maintenance without the overhead of upgrading, patching, and maintaining it long-term. Also, ensure that it supports instant recovery or restoring single objects with no maintenance headache associated.
The estimated size of the backup and the time it takes to back the data depends on the vendor’s ability to compute and manage data.
7. Data Security
The backup and recovery software provider you choose should be free of security defects. You can check out the security certification of the vendor for assurance.
Data backed up in the servers should be safe and protected by the service provider. Also, you need to check the security parameters used during the data transit before finalizing any product.
Data security parameters are important when it comes to managing crucial and sensitive data from your business.
8. Disaster Recovery Plan
A strong and reliable disaster recovery plan is a must. The software you choose should have RPO and RTO objectives in place. Also, the RPO and RTO objectives should be in terms of your business needs.
9. Reputation Matters
Do the backup & recovery solutions give full visibility for data compliance and retention policies? When it comes to backup and recovery strategies, experience and reputation matter.
To find out, ask questions about customer support channels to gain insights on their backup & restore assistance. Check if they are meeting the specific compliance and security mandates. For best results, always consider a company with a good track record of data backup and recovery techniques.
10. Schedule a Test Drive
You never know when unplanned IT outages, natural disasters, or human errors might hit you. It is important to ensure that the software you choose can bring back workloads to production in seconds.
Most BCDR companies run free trial periods, so you can leverage them by testing in an actual environment. It is important to test the software before you trust it with your data. If you haven’t tried it out yet, get started with it today. Zmanda does offer a free trial to get a first-hand experience before opting for it.
Wrap-Up
Many data backup and data recovery specialists are mushrooming in the business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) marketplace. But the real challenge with most recovery tools is the limited support for workloads that forces you to integrate or deploy additional solutions.
Many times, the data backup and disaster recovery solutions miss out on crucial aspects such as RPO & RTO for data backup and restoration. Besides, you need to customize the DR plan to meet complex enterprise needs. This is cumbersome and definitely not smart enough.
With Zmanda, it took years of our proven expertise and experience to build comprehensive data backup and recovery procedures that are highly flexible and innovative to cover what may come tomorrow. Zmanda delivers near-zero downtime with the DRaaS plan that perfectly fits your requirements. With Zmanda, you are always recovery-ready! So now, you enjoy the freedom of choosing the infrastructure type for data recovery across VMs, physical servers, or any cloud platform.
Zmanda believes in one goal: to feel safe with the backups. It also checks all the checkpoints mentioned above. Right from data security, ease of use, and deployment, to free trial, Zmanda offers it all. With 24×7 world-class platform support coupled with a zero-maintenance pipeline, Zmanda’s data backup and recovery solution truly live up to it.
Want to try it out Zmanda? Schedule a free test drive today!
