In March of this year, Aktuálně.cz published an article about how Petr Horálek, a world-renowned astrophotographer awarded by NASA itself, lost a large part of his photographs. During his most recent major mission, when he was photographing an annular solar eclipse in Argentina, a thief stole most of his photographic equipment from his car, as well as 80 gigabytes of data representing several years of work. Although the photographer had backed up his data to an external drive, it too unfortunately became the subject of the theft. This shows how important it is to follow the golden 3-2-1 rule when backing up.
The 3-2-1 rule is usually interpreted as having “three different copies of data stored on at least two types of media and in at least one physically separate location.” Most of us, like photographer Mr. Horálek, usually have our data stored in one location, i.e. on our PC’s hard drive with a backup on external media, or, in the case of a company, with a backup on a network drive. And it does not have to be just theft; it could be a ransomware attack that can encrypt and destroy data on the drive as well as local backups. At that moment, we understand the final part of the golden backup rule, but by then it is usually too late.
While companies previously addressed this problem with tape media archived separately from the production environment, today we have secure cloud storage available, which meets the requirements for a separate location very well. Cloud storage also provides convenient automatic backups without intervention and usually without the user's awareness.
Although, according to our latest findings, 88% of Czech companies still prefer so-called on-premise solutions that back up company data to local storage, cloud solutions are becoming increasingly popular. There are many reasons in favor of cloud backup solutions today: first, the price per stored data is becoming increasingly advantageous due to the growing supply of cloud storage space, with backup solutions offering virtually unlimited space no longer being exceptional. Another important factor is the growing number of portable devices used for work and the higher risks arising from their loss. Finally, many businesses have already tried services such as Dropbox and Google Drive only to find that they are more suited to storing and sharing files than to securely backing up and restoring critical data, and therefore they are looking for full-fledged cloud backup.
However, this does not mean that local backups will disappear into history anytime soon. Local backups play a key role in recovering data after its loss. While recovery from the cloud is limited by internet connection speed, workstations and systems can be restored much faster from a local backup, allowing users or companies to reduce business downtime and thus minimize losses.
The advantages of both types of backup, local and cloud-based, are combined by so-called hybrid backup solutions, which provide both a high level of data security and fast recovery. In addition, they can unify data protection through backup and management of all individual work environments in both local and cloud locations, on physical systems as well as virtual platforms and machines. Hybrid backup not only protects data according to the 3-2-1 rule, but also enables the transition from protecting a complete device image to protecting a complete image of the digital business whose transformation we are currently experiencing.
Zdeněk Bínek, Acronis
The article was published on 7 April on Reseller Magazine Online
Source: https://www.acronis.cz/proc-zalohovat-lokalne-cloudu/
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
