Cloud backup services are moving into everyday operations of an enterprise. Organizations must be cautious before selecting their cloud backup provider considering the fact that every single information of theirs has unique value and needs to be secured. It is important to make certain that the selected cloud provider handles the organizations backups and restores efficaciously without having any inconsistencies as they are not truly enterprise ready. Additionally, the seeding and data accumulation needs also have to be kept in mind to evaluate the available choice.

In the present epoch, cloud backup providers provide advanced capabilities such as application awareness, system-state recovery capabilities, bare-metal recovery capabilities, and the facility to backup open files. Along with these advancements, the providers are also delivering cloud storage capabilities within on-premise backup solutions. These novel cloud computing applications automatically create effective backup by making a copy of that backup to the cloud. As an effective case in point, one can consider Microsoft Azure, which enables cloud backup capabilities for virtual machines.

As there are numerous cloud backup providers in the market, it is imperative to gaze at their distinguishing capabilities and features offered by each of them. The ultimate objective is to decide which one of them will best suit the organizations needs and provide the finest backup strategy for their IT environment. Further, the parameters such as recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) should also be scrutinized in the deciding process.

Pilot tests should be carried out by setting up and testing with some trial accounts and performing backups before a particular cloud-based backup solution is taken onboard. Organizations have to be careful at this point of their choice and have to select properly as in certain cases, the cloud service providers are likely to highlight many features and capabilities while advertising, but still provide a below par experience when it comes to restoring data. It is also to be kept in mind that all the cloud backup provider's service capacity might not be fully compatible with the systems that the organization is looking forward to protect. One of the ways to ensure the safekeeping of cloud-to-cloud data backup is to encrypt data prior to transmission.

These two factors are those that organizations should not obliterate while choosing a cloud service provider. Data seeding denotes the swathe of creating initial backup in the cloud. Besides, it is also idealistic to be expecting to upload manifold terabytes of data across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time.

Data accumulation mentions the rate of data creation as juxtaposing to the speed at which the data can be uploaded to the cloud backup. This is also another factor that decides which provider has to be chosen. To illustrate, if an organization is creating 500GB of data every day and has the capability to upload only 300GB of data, the cloud backup strategy is inadequate to keep the tempo with the data growth.

As the technology is fast becoming an integral part of business, organizations must also look deeper into the additional storage capacity and other services that the provider will offer over time. Further, it is also necessary to find out whether the providers customize their solutions according to the growing needs of the organization.

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Key Factors to Choose the Right Cloud-based Backup Service - CIOReview