On-Site Backup vs. Cloud-Based Backup, Which is Better?

There’s no doubting that data backup is a critical component of any small and medium-sized business’s infrastructure. Backup and disaster recovery is important in the event that your organization experiences a death-blow in the form of a data loss disaster. Yet, there’s some debate as to whether an on-site data backup solution can be as effective as the cloud. The verdict: both are essential.

According to a survey conducted by research firm Clutch, 46 percent of respondents claim that on-site backup is just as important as cloud-based backup. In comparison, 42 percent of respondents actually prefer on-site backups, while only a meager 11 percent claimed that on-site backup was less important than the cloud-based alternative. The survey asked businesses with up to 500 employees to discover which type of backup and disaster recovery solution they preferred to use.

While it’s certainly true that you don’t want to exclusively store your data backups on-site, it’s important to see the benefits that this can provide. What would happen if your data from the cloud were to be inaccessible for some reason? What if there were complications with deploying your backup from the cloud, like if your backup was too large to migrate back to your network in a reasonable amount of time? That being said, the more locations that your data backups are stored in, the better, as it gives you a better chance of recovering should you be unfortunate enough to face down a hardware failure, flood, electrical storm, or cyber attack.

Preferred recommends that your business consider the benefits of using a compound backup and disaster recovery solution, one that keeps both an on-site backup and a cloud-based backup for access when you need it most. In particular, our Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution is capable of providing your business with powerful data backup solutions that practically ensure the survival of your business’s critical assets in the event of a disaster.

Our BDR solution can take multiple backups of your data throughout the workday, up to every fifteen minutes. This keeps data loss to a minimum and ensures that your backups will be as recent as possible. These data backups are taken automatically, which eliminates the need for manual execution and clears the possibility of user error. The BDR then sends your data backups to multiple locations, which can include on-site, the cloud, and a secure, off-site data center.

Perhaps the most valuable asset that our BDR solution provides is the ability to restore your backups directly from the cloud, to the BDR device. In essence, it acts as a temporary server unit, and can act as such until you decide on a plan of action to replace your inoperable hardware. This prevents the nasty downtime that often cripples business’s IT budgets and operations.

To learn more, reach out to us at 708-781-7110.