How to Choose the Right Backup Solution?

Introduction

Given today's reality regarding the importance of data and its protection, convincing business leaders that they need to have a comprehensive backup policy is no longer necessary. What is necessary for business leaders is choosing the right backup solution for their organization. This can be complicated, costly, and ultimately fail to meet the current or future needs of the organization. What follows is a guide of requirements that your chosen solution should at least meet if not exceed.

Reliable

The Internet is full of guides advising readers on how to best choose their backup solution, some of them are great while others focus on factors that may only become important in the organization's future. The first and most important factor, sometimes never discussed and often assumed, is that the solution needs to be reliable and work when needed. In order for any solution to check the best backup solution box, it needs to guarantee that no data will be lost and perform consistently as expected.

Ability to Adapt

For many organizations, several technologies and systems have been adopted. The backup solution needs to be able to cover all these bases. Further, ideally, the solution needs to be able to cover future adoptions and technology upgrades to leave no gaps in the data protection policy. This includes migration to cloud services and cloud storage.

Simple to Use

Your chosen solution should not place any additional administrative burdens on your IT teams. It should be easy to use and operate to ensure that data protection policies are best served by the solution. If the solution has a steep learning curve it may not be the solution for you. While being easy to use it must be comprehensive and complete. The varied requirements of an organization need to be met so if the solution is simple both in its operation and its scope of protection it will leave the organization open to a nasty surprise in the future.

Wide Scope

Given the varied data, as well as the sheer amount of stored data, organizations deal with daily a backup solution needs to include a wide scope of tasks it can complete. These include functionality to both start and stop processes, create and delete files, generate alerts, validate that backups are not encountering errors, and much more.

Data Retrieval

Being able to back up the organization's data is half of the story. The chosen solution also needs to be able to retrieve the backed-up data when needed in an emergency or otherwise. In general, solutions that follow legislative requirements, international standards, and best practices place a shared emphasis on data retrieval as well as data backup.

Virtualization

Just as being able to cater to cloud solutions has become a vital facet of modern backup solutions, so has virtualization. By this what is meant is that backup solutions need to be able to cater to virtual environments employed by the organization. This is true for images created on the platform and machines running virtual environments.

Conclusion

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does include some helpful tips for choosing your backup solution. These tips have also been considered with both current and possible future demands an organization might have.