Why Two Clouds Are Better Than One
Everyone knows that backup is mandatory in modern business.
Needless to say, losing critical data is never an option.
Today, even the toughest and biggest cloud storage providers may experience data loss or outage, therefore it is crucial to ensure that every file has multiple copies stored in different locations.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s not that we are paranoid.
But rather, we and businesses across the globe have realized that it’s better to spend money upfront on mission-critical instances and files, than to experience downtime of several days.
With that in mind, in this article we will discuss the benefits and feasibility of employing two cloud storage services for offsite backup.
The cloud can play an instrumental part in your backup efforts.
The industry’s biggest players — Amazon and Google— offer everything you need when it comes to data backup: durable storage, flexible pricing, 256-bit encryption, retention policies, and a slew of other features.
Let’s start off with Amazon.
The behemoth of Seattle is by far the most popular cloud solution on the market when it comes to data storage.
The list of Amazon’s storage tiers at your disposal includes S3, Standard-IA and Glacier.
If your main goal is to perform data backup, Standard-IA is the right choice, with reasonable fees for both data storage and data retrieval.
But you shouldn’t get complacent with just one cloud storage.
What if something goes wrong at Amazon, or more likely, you end up configuring a faulty retention policy?
That would be your single point of failure.
You, therefore, should always have another cloud backup that will save the day in case of unexpected data loss.
The market is filled with numerous other solutions, among which stands out another cloud giant — Google.
Google Cloud Platform offers Nearline backend storage platform as their answer to
Amazon’s Standard-IA.
But instead of seeing them as competitors, you may very well employ both cloud storage services for data backup purposes.
That way if something goes south at one location, you can always rely on the other one.
In fact, you can even configure lifecycle policies on both backup locations so that your backed up data is automatically transferred to much cheaper Archival tiers; namely,
Amazon Glacier and Google Coldline.
The degree of flexibility is truly high, and coupled with time-tested durability and security, you should be able to come up with a setup that best suits your needs.
Another benefit of using a two-cloud backup strategy is that if one backup plan fails and the other runs successfully, there’s no need to be concerned.
It is only when both backup plans fail to execute, often due to restriction-related issues, that you need to investigate the predicament further.
This approach liberates you from checking that every file is being consistently backed up by every plan you’ve set up.
The cloud should invariably be your foremost tool when it comes to data backup.
Having two cloud locations will prove beneficial to your backup strategy, offering flexible, redundant, and secure cloud storage at a reasonable cost.
Alexander Negrash is head of marketing at CloudBerry Lab, which provides cloud-based backup and file management solutions for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
