As more organizations turn to cloud-based solutions, it’s no surprise that many are using cloud-connected appliances to solve their data protection challenges. But what does the growing trend of cloud-connected appliances (hybrid cloud backup, if you’re fancy) really mean for your business? And how do these appliances enable a new approach to backup, disaster recovery and archiving?

June 18, 2015

5 Min Read
Top 5 Benefits of Cloud-Connected Appliances

By Infrascale Guest Blog 1

As more organizations turn to cloud-based solutions, it’s no surprise that many are using cloud-connected appliances to solve their data protection challenges. But what does the growing trend of cloud-connected appliances (hybrid cloud backup, if you’re fancy) really mean for your business? And how do these appliances enable a new approach to backup, disaster recovery and archiving? 

Here are the top five benefits of cloud-connected appliances to help explain what they can do to meet your data protection needs.

1. Solving the Hardware Conundrum

Data explosion continues to have widespread impact across the enterprise, specifically for IT. IDC projects that the number of files will grow 75x over the next 10 years. But industry forecasts for storage capacity is only growing at 2.6X–creating a significant capacity challenge for companies.

With IT budgets and staffing levels remaining flat, companies need to figure out how to bridge the growing capacity chasm without adding lots of hardware.

Cloud-connected appliances solve the hardware conundrum by capitalizing on new technology so you can stream data to the cloud based on its age and corporate value. Not all data requires expensive local capacity, and these appliances allow IT to keep mission-critical data local and use the cloud (which is more affordable) for storage needs.

2. Meeting Backup Windows in a Data Growth World

The problem of not meeting backup windows is familiar for many IT managers. Today, explosive data growth has made it really difficult for IT to back up all of the critical data within shrinking backup windows. This is particularly problematic for companies that are backing up directly to the cloud.

A cloud-connected appliance solves the “backup window” shortcomings of direct-to-cloud backup through advanced deduplication technology. When replicating data to a secondary unit (or cloud), advanced technology uploads only the changes, which reduces replication windows.

3. No More Latency Issues for Cloud-Based Backup

Many companies have turned to cloud-based backup to eliminate off-site physical storage costs and maintenance expenses. The problem is that backup and recovery can take longer in the cloud. With an average Internet connection (25 mbps) it would take a company four days to replicate five terabytes of data with traditional direct-to-cloud replication. This places a practical limit of cloud-based replication to about 3 terabytes per day, making it impractical for larger companies looking to protect larger data sets.

With cloud-connected appliances, companies can store mission-critical data locally and make the appliance the point of first restore. Ensuring recovery takes place over LAN speeds instead of WAN speeds (with cloud based backup), companies can still have the cost savings from cloud-based backup and meet recovery time objectives.

4. Push-Button Disaster Recovery

As a company’s dependence on computer systems increases, so does the need to ensure that business operations can be recovered with minimal disruption in case those systems go down. In this competitive landscape, can any business afford downtime?

For too long, companies have rolled the dice without a disaster recovery (DR) solution because it required a heavy infrastructure investment and additional IT resources to build and maintain an off-site DR environment.

Infrascale’s cloud-connected appliances replicate data and applications to the cloud, eliminating the cost barriers to a comprehensive DR solution. They also deliver one-click recovery, so you can boot and run your systems and applications from the appliance or the cloud in minutes.

5. Eliminating Pitfalls of Tape and Disk-Based Backup

Two major challenges plague tape and disk-based backup methods: reliability and scalability. Tape’s fragile nature and susceptibility to deterioration results in a high recovery failure rate. It can also be difficult to manage and requires a significant investment in backup network architecture. Disk-based backup appliances are more reliable, but are often priced out of reach for most SMBs and are limited by the amount of storage space. Once you fill up backup appliances, you typically need to upgrade to a bigger box or buy a second appliance.

With cloud-connected appliances, companies no longer have to take on the high recovery failure rate risks and high costs of these backup methods. By treating the cloud as an archive for lower-priority data, companies can eliminate a big chunk of traditional maintenance and storage costs.

Key Takeways

With cloud-connected appliances, companies can leverage the benefits of an on-premise appliance and overcome many of the shortcomings of cloud-based backup.  They allow you to:

  • Have LAN access to your most important data in terms of latency and bandwidth while giving you the protection and low cost of offsite cloud storage.

  • Untether cloud storage from the appliance.  This means storage on the cloud-connected appliance grows much more slowly, since it only needs to be large enough to store a few backups (as the associated incremental data) and your most critical data and applications.

  • Recover from failure quickly with push-button DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service), so that you can boot applications or servers from the appliance or cloud.

With cloud-connected appliances, companies can replace antiquated backup and storage solutions to gain better data mobility and agility with higher operational resiliency in the cloud.  

For more in-depth information about the benefits of cloud-connected appliances, check out our Ebook: Top 5 Benefits of Cloud-Connected Appliances.

Ken Garcia is the director of content marketing at Infrascale. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

 

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