The best cloud backup and online storage providers offer numerous features, including the following.
Encryption
Many providers offer 256-bit encryption, which meets the U.S. government’s requirements for managing private data. This protection can provide some assurance that your information is safe.
Performance
Most cloud storage providers offer various performance tiers that include an array of additional support. Lower tiers usually include limited storage space and don’t provide standard download and upload speeds when backing up data. With higher tiers, you won’t have to worry about bandwidth throttling, slow recoveries or low storage capacities.
Collaboration
Having collaborative features included in your cloud backup provider allows your team to access shared files and data from any device. Additionally, most providers automatically synchronize data. Collaboration features include password-protected file links, shared chat threads and quick notification delivery on available documents.
Disaster Recovery
There are two key aspects to consider when looking for a cloud backup service: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO, according to TechTarget, is the age of the files that must be recovered in the event of a disruption. RPO is usually expressed backward in time. It can be specified in minutes, hours or days. Another way of looking at RPO, according to Advisera, is “the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost.” Essentially, it refers to the frequency of file backups. If your RPO is, say, 120 minutes, and a major incident happened, you’ll lose a significant amount of data. You, therefore, want to continuously update the frequency or how often you back up your files. If your RPO is 120 minutes, you want to back up your data every two hours.
RTO is the window of time (and service level) with which a business process must be restored following a disruption.
Online backup solutions are traditionally designed to store data at a low cost and recover small bits of information. They are not intended to recover massive amounts of data quickly following a disaster, because backup services are notoriously slow at recovery. Recovering 100TBs from a backup service might take days, because the service must replenish all your data and copy it into the primary storage system.
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