Cloud services and applications - often touted as stable processing and storage systems - still have a hiccup once in a while. What's a company to do when their cloud services go belly up? Funny enough, the answer is to back up your cloud data to other cloud services ahead of time. While most cloud services offer some degree of guaranteed uptime, many don't guarantee against data loss, and that's on the client to make accommodations for. In fact, most instances of data loss are caused by human error, simply by accidentally overwriting a field or wiping a dataset. And, plenty of data is deleted when a client doesn't renew a subscription.
Backing up cloud data to another cloud offers many benefits over local backups, namely not needing to maintain physical disks onsite plus accessibility. And, backups can be repurposed for data mining and analytics projects without affecting the original data.
Given this, what resources are available for cloud-to-cloud backups? Unfortunately, the market is a bit thin at this time. And, with how diverse primary cloud solutions are it can be difficult to engineer a backup solution that's platform agnostic. However, progress is being made, especially in the IaaS market and there are plans to create backup services capable of backing up entire virtual machines.
For private clouds, cloud gateways are an option. Using cloud service APIs, providers can create virtualized backup and deduplication solutions that can run in the cloud. The market is transitioning from the "data dump" of past to more refined, thoughtful backup solutions to work with today's innovations. And, as technology improves backup processes will be easier than ever.
This article was based on a ComputerWeekly.com article by Stephen Pritchard.