Enterprises and small businesses are migrating to the cloud in staggering numbers. The use of cloud backup strategies is rising in popularity so much that, by 2024, it’s predicted to make up 14.2% of global enterprise expenditure.
Cloud migration and backup are, however, not without their perils. Slight missteps can mean vast additions to business expenses, as opposed to the reductions that partly make the cloud so popular.
As a partner to leading cloud vendors, KPI Analytics can share practices that help avoid common pitfalls of backing data up to the cloud.
Ensure that your organization follows these three.
The rise of the infrastructure-as-a-Service industry has predictably led to an influx of new vendors into the cloud services market. For the CXO planning a cloud migration and backup strategy, this makes finding a partner highly risky.
Needless to say, the quality of service is far from standard across all these vendors.
The most effective way to establish the type of vendor that makes the best fit for your business is to assess your current and projected needs.
Consider the computing resources your organization consumes presently. Then, map out how that may increase in not just the coming months, but years.
An ideal cloud vendor can immediately make new resources available as your business’ usage rises. And, should you need fewer resources at a later time, they must also be able to help you downscale.
Similarly, only consider vendors with consistently high uptime. Frequent downtime foreshadows, on your end, costly business disruption.
The use of cloud backup strategies may result in fewer odds of data loss, but there’s yet more you can do for improved security.
Redundancy is a particularly effective method. Especially for your organization’s most sensitive data, create backups on separate clouds.
You may extend this approach to the rest of the systems your organization uses with very low effort. For example, integrations enable automatic backups from cloud-native applications such as G Suite or Office 365 directly to your chosen platform.
Data you may not need to access immediately, even after loss from your main storage, can go into archive storage for lower costs.
Backing your data up to the cloud naturally creates the risk of malicious attacks and breaches. Although enterprises have been popular targets for years, small businesses, Forbes reports, may face an attack frequency increase of more than 53% in the coming years.
Vendors with AI-enabled and ML-driven security features tend to offer robust protection against evolving threats. But, even then, it falls on your organization to consolidate the needed defenses.
The extent to which you outsource your IT also influences how much you need to do for your protection.
At a minimum, your organization’s cloud backups require you to implement a security protocol. A strong one effectively prevents outside access, especially taking into account that compromised employee accounts often provide entry points for bad faith actors.
It’s of equal importance to have a response plan in case of a breach. Ideally, it outlines a turnkey solution for mitigating damage and instantly limiting intruder access, even at the temporary cost of non-critical operations.
The KPI Network has vendors with some of the world’s most high-performing cloud operation and backup solutions. We compile and update offers from them regularly so you, an organizational leader, can initiate your business’ cloud-driven expansion at significantly lower costs.
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