Online backup: the tipping point?

However, in spite of the obvious advantages, UK organisations have traditionally been slow to adopt cloud services and online backup is no exception. In January this year, Redwood Software released the results of a survey into the use of cloud computing by large US and UK firms. The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne and found that a mere 35% of UK firms were using the cloud for private data storage compared with 58% in the US.The UK may have been trailing behind its cousin across the pond at the beginning of this year but there is evidence to suggest that we are approaching a tipping point for a spike in the adoption of online backup by UK businesses. In March, Computer Weekly surveyed 1300 IT professionals and found that the use of cloud backup for disaster recovery by UK firms was set to rise from 36% to 51% over the next six months.

More recently, Redstor surveyed 120 UK companies about their data backup provision and found that only 45% were currently utilising online backup. However, of those not currently using it, 39% intended to implement a solution in the next 12 months. When coupled with the fact that nearly a fifth of organisations surveyed said they were not confident that their data was adequately protected, this points towards a change in attitude towards online backup in the UK.

Why is confidence increasing?
The increasing confidence in online backup could be attributed to a number of things. Many areas of the UK are beginning to be equipped with fibre optic internet connectivity, enabling superfast broadband services and giving businesses the confidence that an online backup solution would not be hindered by slow internet speeds. Security has also been a major concern for CIOs and IT Managers in the past when considering cloud services and this remains true today. However, many of these security fears appear to have been alleviated. A study conducted by ComScore on behalf of Microsoft in June surveyed 321 SMBs in the UK, France and Germany and found that 96% of companies that had adopted cloud services believed that they had gained security benefits as a result.

Whilst last year Forrester found that a massive 75% of data breaches actually come from inside a business, suggesting that companies should be more concerned with internal than external attacks.

How are businesses likely to benefit
from online backup?
As confidence in online backup grows, more and more businesses will begin to benefit from the various features which make it a far better option than dated tape and disk and on-premise solutions:

A faster and more reliable backup
and restore process
It is imperative that a modern business can access its backed up data both quickly and from multiple locations. Online backup enables employees to perform a restore at the touch of a button and, depending on the size of the restore, this can be done in a matter of seconds.

Generally, the moment an employee realises that they have lost a file or that they need to restore some archived data, is the moment they need to access it. It is therefore not ideal to have to wait hours for the correct tape to be located and transported from the off-site archive, all the while praying that the restore will be successful.

Imagine if a document crucial to submitting a time sensitive proposal was corrupted or accidentally deleted half an hour before the deadline to submit it. The only other copy has been backed up to tape and archived; there is no way that the employee would be able to recover the document in time to submit it. Worst case scenario, the employee fails to secure the new business, denting the company’s revenue and negatively impacting its reputation.

In terms of disaster recovery, if a fire, flood or any other event should occur rendering a company’s main office out of action, backing up online means that data can be easily and quickly restored, minimising the impact on productivity. Again, performing a mass restore in the event of a disaster when everything is backed up to tape is a long, arduous and often problematic process.

Worse still, if a company is simply backing up to on-premise hardware, chances are that it won’t have any sort of disaster recovery plan in place.

Lower overheads and greater flexibility
Online backup is generally cheaper than tape and on-premise solutions. It enables businesses to avoid the commitment of expensive upfront hardware purchases and lengthy contract tie-ins; providers store data at their own off-site datacentres, so businesses only pay for the service rather than the entire solution.

This focus on operational expenditure rather than capital expenditure means that businesses can scale their online backup up and down as required; only paying for what they use. In addition, companies implementing online backup are not restricted by the amount of space available on their on-premise storage as online backup can scale up indefinitely. Services that back up online are also completely automated, performing backups at regular intervals. This removes the need for IT staff to spend time swapping over backup tapes and transporting them off-site or
maintaining on-premise hardware, freeing up their time to perform more value-add tasks.

It is also important to note that the flexibility of online backup extends to hybrid systems, integrating existing on-premise or tape solutions with an online service. This enables businesses to tailor their backup to their specific requirements and to continue to benefit from existing infrastructure investments.

Increased security that ensures compliance
Corporate data can be highly sensitive, containing information about a company’s clients, names and addresses and often financial information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is very clear about what is expected of organisations when handling this data: the seventh principle of the Data Protection Act states “Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data”. In other words, organisations must have appropriate security in place to prevent the personal data they hold from being accidentally or deliberately compromised.

Traditional backup solutions involve someone physically managing the backup process before storing the data on-premise, or transporting it off-site for disaster recovery purposes. Business leaders utilising these methods need to ask themselves if they are happy bearing the responsibility of handling corporate data whilst off-site, if they trust the people handling the data and given their current method, what penalties they would incur if data was lost, or worse, stolen.

In July 2012, the ICO imposed a £150,000 fine on a financial services company. The reason for the fine was the loss of two backup tapes from an access-controlled room on the premises of the fined company. The tapes were unencrypted and held details pertaining to current and former employees of the company as well as personal details of a portion of their customer base.

Any reputable enterprise online backup provider will be compliant with ICO legislation. This means that businesses can be confident that their corporate data is being handled with appropriate security in place. The burden of ensuring that appropriate security is in place also falls to the cloud service provider. Typically, financially backed SLAs ensure that should there be any lapses; the service subscriber will be adequately compensated in the unlikely event that a data breach occurs.

Leading UK cloud providers offer a fully encrypted backup service, which requires no need for any onsite backup hardware or software. This also minimises human interaction with the backup process, saving time and eliminating issues around human error or omission. Any data is sent securely to the providers’ data centres which would be based in the UK (and tend to be outside of the M25 orbital risk zone). Ideally all data should be encrypted before transit and whilst at rest on the providers’ platforms, meaning that only the end user is able to read their data. Any provider worth its salt will also be ISO9001 (Quality Management) and ISO27001 (Information Security Management) accredited.