Why You Should Backup Your IaaS Cloud

Cloud technologies are rapidly becoming a stable go-to option when it comes to implementing IT services and systems. The advantages are clear — no hardware to manage; no network to expand; no upfront costs; the ability to scale, and so on. This is why 78 percent of companies are either using or implementing cloud solutions.

But, a whopping 80 percent of these organizations have lost data in the cloud – including the recent data loss that customers of SalesForce.com just experienced.

The reason is scary. The cloud is often perceived as being above and beyond normal IT operations. It’s almost as if strict data governance standards, corporate regulations, and business continuity policies should not apply to the cloud.

This is a very dangerous misconception. Your business depends on your data – wherever it is. You should include all your cloud instances — especially infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) —  into your organization’s business continuity, disaster recovery, and data protection strategies, plans, and activities. And yes — this includes backup.

You might assume that your IaaS vendors back up your systems. Do they? Do you know the schedule? Have you ever tried to recover? What was the recovery time? Did you meet your organizational RTOs and RPOs? Have you run any DR exercises? Relying on your IaaS vendor to back up your data without your direct and constant control is like relying on your operating system to back up your Microsoft Exchange server without you configuring anything.

When it comes to data protection, there is no difference between your on-premise physical, virtual, or cloud workloads. You must treat them equally based on the system's importance to your business.

If you have not backed up your IaaS cloud workloads yet, NOW is the time to look for a solution that supports cloud workloads and start protecting your data!

Avoid point solutions that only support the cloud so you don’t have to manage multiple backup solutions. Instead, choose a hybrid cloud backup solution that protects your entire IT infrastructure — cloud workloads, virtual systems, physical servers, applications and endpoints. 

If you would like to see more, try it for yourself? Check out the beta version of forthcoming Acronis Backup 12 solution and see how you can protect your IaaS cloud. Do it now!