5 Reasons Why Hybrid Backup Should Be Your Customers’ Priority

By Carbonite Guest Blog

While smart business owners realize how vital backup is for protecting their digital assets, they may look to you for help in deciding whether to back up locally or in the cloud.

This provides a perfect opportunity to advise them of the advantages of a hybrid approach to backup. Here are five reasons why your customers need a comprehensive, hybrid backup solution to protect their data and keep their businesses running.

Reason No. 1: Data is a business’s lifeblood.

Whether your customers have client records, contracts, HIPAA-restricted documents, tax records, intellectual property, etc., these are the lifeblood of their business. Your customers need to ensure these documents are protected real-time and in the cloud—at an affordable cost.

Reason No. 2: A data backup strategy needs to protect against virtually any scenario.

Data loss scenarios range from viruses to fires. But while a cloud-based backup may seem to be the more complete data protection strategy, your customers need to consider the speed required to restore data and resume business if/when a disaster occurs. Remind them that onsite solutions outperform cloud solutions in terms of recovery speed. Hence your recommendation to go with a hybrid solution; broad protection and fast data recovery.  

Reason No. 3: The best backup system is the one that’s easiest to deploy.

Many organizations rely on tape, which offers affordability. However, tape is limited by long average seek times and poor reliability. IT teams could devise a disk-based backup solution from scratch. But these solutions risk burdening businesses with laborious manual operations, or with the need to retain software/hardware experts. Purpose-built, integrated, and pre-tested backup appliances, on the other hand, offer simple implementation with automatic backup.

Reason No. 4: Customers need the security of offsite, rapid restore of onsite and automated operations.

Whatever your customers’ businesses, a hybrid approach combining onsite and cloud backup offers clear advantages over either solution alone. Hybrid backup enables high uptime in case of localized problems (e.g., disk failures), and long-term continuity in case of catastrophes (e.g., earthquakes).  Moreover, hybrid backup appliances integrate easily and protect any mix of structured and unstructured data. The best hybrid backup appliances can actually reduce overall cost of ownership through software-based automation, and minimize the need for manual administration.

Reason No. 5: Let businesses do what they’re supposed to do and not worry about their data.

Because digital assets play such a critical role in the success of a business, it only makes sense for customers to assign top priority to protecting data against daily risks. Cloud-based and onsite-based strategies each offer their own advantages. But hybrid backup can leverage the benefits of both. By protecting your customers’ business with a hybrid backup appliance, they can focus on their businesses knowing vital corporate data will be there when they need it.

For more information go to www.Carbonite.com.

David Maffei is vice president of Global Channels at Carbonite, a leading cloud backup service provider. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of The VAR Guy's annual platinum sponsorship.