Regardless of the industry, every business runs on data. Modern business houses recognise the importance
of protecting their critical data, which is why they take appropriate measures to safeguard it.

One of the basic ways of protecting valuable data is backing it up. It is imperative to have regular backups
even for a small business. Data loss happens, and if and when it does, it can result in a real disaster. It may
take several days or months to generate lost data like the reports, contracts, documents, content
and more again.

Moreover, with the availability of affordable, easy to use and flexible cloud backup
solutions, why take the risk of losing your data?Why is it a good idea to opt for cloud backup solutions?

Gone are the days when small
businesses copied files to local drives
and external hard drives to protect their
essential data. This approach takes a lot
of time and effort to complete. It is also
vulnerable to many failures like theft, natural disasters like fire, and
unexpected events like hardware
malfunctions.

A report by Boston Computing suggests
that around 60% of the organisations
are prone to be shut down within 6
months of losing their data. After losing
your valuable data, you will have to
spend a lot of time and money to get
your business back on track.

Therefore, it is much better to have a regular backup of
your files; better still, to have an automated solution
using a cloud backup service.

There are many cloud backup service providers in the
market which can help you save yourself from losing
data. However, choosing the best backup solution for
your business can be tricky as you need to consider
various parameters before finally selecting one of them.

How to choose ideal backup solution?
There are several things you need to consider before
zeroing in on a cloud backup service provider. You need
to answer many questions to come up with the perfect
solution. Some of the important answers you should
seek to include:

– Does the provider’s service meet your needs?
Any provider can offer the service that you’re looking
for, but make sure you find out what measures it offers
when there’s a disaster. The provider should have
adequate bandwidth to facilitate rapid restoration.

– How is the data backed up?
Great service providers offer redundant backup
services. So in case something happens in the
provider’s premises, you have a backup of your backup.
Always ensure to ask what kind of disaster recovery
plan the provider has in place.

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What are the costs involved?
Make sure you find out if there are any hidden costs involved. Cloud service providers often have hidden costs attached to their overall fee structure.

How secure will your data be?
One of the most important criteria that you must consider is whether your data will be secure. Don’t be afraid to ask the cloud backup service provider the tough questions about how they plan to secure your data.

In addition to these basic questions, it might be good to consider:
– How much storage space will you need?
– Will multiple versions of the same file be supported?
– What is the security encryption offered by the service provider?
– Who will have access to the data and options to manage the privileges for different users on the same data?
Keeping in mind the answers for the above questions, we have compiled a list of 5 best cloud backup solutions for small businesses.

Best Small Business Backup Solutions

Barracuda Backup:
Barracuda Backup allows businesses to run flawlessly by minimizing downtime and preventing data loss. It has proven to be the industry’s easiest deployable and manageable all-in-one data protection solution. The solution is available in simple pricing options and offers backup software, local storage, de-duplication and offsite replication that can be deployed in under an hour. Barracuda backup offers cloud-based central management for seamless multisite administration.

Some of the best features of the backup solution include:
– Built-in offsite replication to Barracuda Cloud, or a remote physical appliance, or a remote virtual appliance, or public cloud to prevent data loss in case of disaster.
– Offsite vaulting to enable long-term retention.
– Compression and inline de-duplication providing up to 50X reduction in storage and bandwidth requirements.
– Cloud-to-cloud backup offering which protects MS Office 365 environments from data loss with point-in-time recovery.

Barracuda Backup is a single-point solution to protect physical servers as well as virtual machines with unified management for replication and retention. It can replicate data securely and efficiently from an on-premises physical or virtual backup appliance to Barracuda Cloud, a remote physical appliance, a remote virtual appliance, or Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is built on a hardened Linux OS with a lower threat profile and fewer threat vectors compared to Windows-based backup products. It even offers Ransomware Recovery.

Veeam Cloud Backup & DRaaS
Veeam Cloud Connect provides an easy way for you to enter the booming cloud market by getting your customers’ virtual machine (VM) backups and replicas offsite while providing a fully integrated, secure and fast way to backup and restore from the cloud. Veeam enables disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) as part of a comprehensive Availability strategy, embracing virtualization and storage investments in your customers’ data centres and extending them through the hybrid cloud.

Key features of the solution include:
– A cloud host for disaster recovery with CPU, RAM, storage and networking resource allocation from a DRaaS provider.
– Partial and complete failback to restore normal business operations.
– 1-click failover orchestration for quick execution and site failover testing for failover simulation — all without disrupting production workloads.
– Multiple traffic-reduction techniques including replica seeding and built-in WAN acceleration.
– Hosted offsite backups through a secure SSL connection with no additional Veeam licensing required.
– Complete visibility and control to access and recover data in hosted backup repositories directly from the backup console.
– A modern backup architecture.
– End-to-end encryption.

Veeam Cloud Connect provides fully integrated, fast and secure cloud-based disaster recovery through a service provider.

So these were some of the best cloud backup solutions for small businesses. Keep the considerations we mentioned in mind before setting your heart on a cloud backup solution provider and don’t forget to compare the services offered by different providers. So, what are your views on this? Do let us know!