Backing up your data regularly is Disaster Recovery 101. But if you’re only moving it around locally, you’re not fully redundant when disaster strikes. You’re also missing out on capabilities only the cloud can provide.

Cloud-based backup is the preferred method for safeguarding data. It twins your critical business information at a different geographic location. This covers you under a worst-case scenario: your office gets physically wiped out, or at least put out of commission for an extended period, due to natural disaster.

And if you haven’t explored what the cloud can do for you, disaster recovery is a great way to get your feet wet.

Be ready for disaster

Cloud-based backup better than previous disaster recovery options, such a backing up to tape that are moved offsite. Before the cloud you had to pick and choose what you replicated or had to own your own secondary data centre.

Two key reasons to move the cloud for backup are more than enough:

1. Cloud-based disaster recovery means you don’t replicate your own production system at your own facilities, which are costly to build and maintain. You can outsource your disaster recovery to a partner who’s invested the necessary infrastructure that’s secure and using the latest technologies.

2. In the event of a disaster, you can start up replicated systems within minutes, including virtual machines. Your backup provider has its own redundancies in place. Being fully redundant is table stakes today. Your customers expect you to keep operating even in the event of an environmental disruption that might affect your primary base of operations.

Back up data automatically and securely

The good news is disasters that completely wipe out a business’ primary on-premise data centre are few and far between. Most threats to data are the result of human error, systems failure or malicious activity.

In these scenarios, the cloud simplifies and speeds up data backup and restoration:

3. Your data is automatically protected—in real time if necessary—without you having tie up staff and resources to take care of it.

4. You only pay for the data you’re backing up—everything is available as-a-service, including data protection, so you can move from a CapEX model to OpEX model. You no longer must overspend to overprovision because you’re worried you won’t have enough capacity.

5. If you’re a smaller organization, you get the same enterprise-grade public cloud infrastructure as well as all the features and flexibility that come with it, including encryption of data while it’s in transit and at rest regardless of where it’s being stored.

Keep on top of the compliance curb

Data encryption isn’t just about protecting it from threat actors. In today’s regulatory environment, it helps you stay compliant with privacy legislation such as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):

6. Cloud backup enables you to better manage data to meet compliance obligations, which affect smaller organizations as much as large, global ones with extensive IT resources.

7. Compliance means you must also be mindful local data residency requirements. Regulations may require data storage remain in a specific region, or at the vary least, not traverse regions that don’t adhere to the same legislation. The cloud lets you can keep data connected without storing it where it shouldn’t be.

8. Your security requirements can be extended to the cloud because sensitive data can be assigned extra protections in isolated cloud regions. You don’t have to sacrifice accessibility or create silos protect data and meet compliance.

Optimize primary storage with cloud archiving

Some data must be retained years after it’s collected even if it’s not needed for daily business operations—business and legal contract and medical records, for example. The cloud can be a great place to store this information:

9. Deduplication technology allows for data to be cost effectively retained long term. You’re only storing a single copy of the data offsite. In the meantime, you can free up space at your primary data centre through more efficient storage.

10. You can streamline the archival process and reduce costs by moving to the cloud reduces cost. It also reduces the likelihood of errors that come with physical backup media such as tape and human error.

When your business is data driven there’s no excuse not to have a disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity. Having a second copy stored locally isn’t enough. If you move the cloud you’ll gain so much more than just peace of mind.

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place or you think yours is due for an update, check out our Disaster Recovery Primer.