7 things every business should consider when selecting cloud storage and backup providers

It’s nigh on impossible to foresee a last-minute emergency, and much trickier to mitigate damage recovery in the aftermath. Take email provider VFEmail.net for example. By the point at which a nefarious attack infiltrating its servers took full effect, there was very little that could be done to recover a swathe of deleted data across both primary and backup systems. All in all, an estimated 18 years’ worth of emails were lost, rendering users with both paid and free accounts to no longer have existing mailboxes.

7 things every business should consider when selecting cloud storage and backup providers

The reoccurrence of these situations, which in their very instance produce long-term adverse effects to a company’s bottom line, poses a question as to how a business can afford downtime and unavailability of services. Research has shown that it is very difficult for a business to ever truly recover. Around 43 percent of the organisations succumb to the disaster and never resume operations and another whopping 51 percent of businesses go under within two years after IT and infrastructure loss caused by a disaster.

These figures, and a growth in international outages have been contributing factors towards the widespread rise of cloud backup services globally, with the enterprise cloud storage market forecast to see a massive growth surge: from a 2015 total of $18.9 billion to over $112 billion by 2022.

Despite the increased need for cloud storage and backup services, before embarking on a level expenditure at an enterprise level, there are several considerations that need to be made when carefully selecting a cloud storage provider. Ahead of reviewing the seven key factors that we’ll go on to discuss, it’s important to start with the most critical question: how important is your data to your business? From product specifics to vendor expertise, every other consideration you’ll have should flow out of that fundamental question.

Product security

Data security is paramount, as is an understanding of any compliance obligations. Start with getting a clear understanding of the responsibility of each entity and how the provider meets theirs, including the location of decryption keys, two factor authentications, role-based access controls, encryption in transit and at rest as well as platform level protection such as DDOS, IPS\IDS. Providers should offer monitoring and visibility for all data interactions with cloud storage\backup. Data location should be considered if there are compliance obligations that require data sovereignty.

Vendor pedigree

The wide array of start-up cloud storage and backup providers on the market helps widen the choice for customers, however, consideration should be given as to the risks of those without a proven pedigree in providing these services. What happens if these companies fail? Does the provider have good customer service, standards and certifications, and can they provide evidence of these? Can the provider offer customer references, white papers, reference architectures, etc.? Does the provider offer migration services and service roadmaps?

Service exit

A key driver for adopting the cloud is the agility it offers, but that should extend not only to onboarding but also to exiting the service. Organisations should be wary of the possibility of vendor lock-in and whether the service inhibits the ability to move data to a different location, service or provider.

Functional product features

Consideration should be given to the functional features that you need, such as:

• Archive
• Object, block and file storage
• File sharing and synchronisation
• File versioning
• Support for SOAP and REST
• Support for various access requirements (public or private connectivity)

To achieve this, a detailed understanding of your requirements is required. The more mature providers out there will be able to provide professional services to help assess business needs and provide an overview of these functional requirements.

Non-functional product features

Consideration should be given to the functional features that you need. Having the ability to measure the service you are receiving from the provider through a variety of criteria allows you to make informed decisions about the quality of the service, such as availability, scalability, performance, manageability, integration, professional resources and, of course, cost.

Technical or architectural expertise

The provider needs to be able to implement a solution that meets your environmental and data needs. One major example is having the right solution for your organisation’s volume of data: enterprise-scale backup must account for hundreds of terabytes of data, whereas SMB data volumes are typically below 10TB.

Similarly, backing up from multiple sites versus one large site is going to be different. One thing to consider when choosing a provider is designing the network to make sure you have reliable connectivity and bandwidth for backups to be completed successfully within your backup windows

Offers solutions that meet your business and cost requirements

The solution should match your business requirements: Is the backup going to be used only for data / file restores or for recovery in the event of a disaster? Does your provider have the expertise to recover your business from that data? What are the recovery time objectives achievable for recovering from that backed up data? Does your business require the ability to restore locally in addition to storing data remotely in the cloud?

Can your provider offer the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud for long term data retention? Are you looking for fully managed backups (since you don’t have the skills internally) or for self-service backups?

Being in the position to answer these questions will enable decision-making that supersedes a Proof of Concept (PoC) review. With the right backup and cloud storage provider effectively acting as your first line of defence against both planned and purely circumstantial disasters, it’s essential to carefully review and determine which service provider will be a good fit for your business’ needs.

Given the wide variety of choice on the market, it’s easy to become attached to an organisation delivering support via a complex ticketing system that really shortcuts on delivery. With a good reference check, adequate terms of service, all complemented by a reasonable exit clause, you’ll be able to establish an infrastructure built with resilience and prepared for every eventuality.

By Carmel Owens, Sales Director Cloud Services EMEA at Sungard Availability Services

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