Hybrid Restore – The Missing Piece in Cloud Backup and Recovery

By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research

For the micro- and small-business market, cloud computing provides opportunities that just cannot be found elsewhere. Specifically, many enterprise computing services like storage, backup and recovery, and productivity applications for sales and marketing are financially out of reach for the small business market. That’s where cloud computing comes in. Cloud solutions provide an incremental cost for many of these previously unaffordable capabilities, opening them up for small- and micro-sized businesses.

One area that bears a closer look for the small business market is online backup and recovery. Some industry sources estimate that approximately half of computer users will experience a loss of data at some point, and businesses that experience a major loss of data may not be able to recover and could end up going out of business. Those numbers are sobering. They can also be a major catalyst for small businesses to seek affordable ways to mitigate the risk of data loss.

That’s why online backup services for consumers and small businesses (such as Carbonite) have grown considerably over the past few years.

At the same time, cloud backup and recovery solutions have at least one important consideration: the amount of time it takes to restore data. While backups can be done incrementally, in the event of the total loss of data, organizations want to restore completely. And a complete restore of gigabytes of data, over an Internet connection, can take days.

That’s why a newer option in this market is a hybrid online/local service that allows organizations to maintain up-to-date local copies of critical business data that are available to speed the recovery process in the event of a data loss. Using a hybrid model can significantly reduce recovery and restore times for small and mid-sized businesses.
Some of the leading solutions in the online backup and recovery market provide users with the hybrid option for protection. Mozy is an EMC solution that provides a cloud-based solution in addition to local backup options. EVault SaaS and its companion products from i365, a Seagate company, provide an array of services to meet the needs of small businesses to protect their data and systems.

In addition, a recent announcement by cloud-based backup provider KineticD adds further features to this hybrid model of online backup and recovery. KineticD’s flagship product, KineticSecure, offers the combination of cloud-based and local backup, with a hardware-agnostic local component that can use a standard server or external backup hard drives. The complete current data structure is captured locally, and then streamed to the cloud, protecting all of the current data. KineticSecure also provides plug-ins to assist with set-up, including Oracle, SQL Server, QuickBooks, and a number of other common server types.

Recently, KineticD acquired ROBOBAK, a provider of hybrid-cloud backup software. The combined solution will provide agentless backup options that combine with continuous protection to support day-to-day operations for small business users. Users can backup, restore, access and share information online from any location, whether they are onsite, mobile, or located in a remote office.

With all of the options available today for backup and disaster recovery, it is important that small businesses identify which features are most important for their business, not only today, but tomorrow as well. For small business owners, as your business grows and expands, make sure that a particular service provider has the features you need to support your data and business needs. Because down-time due to a data loss or hardware disaster can literally bring business to a grinding halt, it is critical to evaluate all of the nuances of backup and recovery, and then look to the cloud to provide you with affordable, secure options to protect your most precious resources.