Tape backup for electronic information has been around for over 50 years, yet not much has changed other than the amount of data that can be stored on the tape.   Speaking from experience, the hope is that one will not have to restore from the tapes because it is a slow/painful experience and, worse yet, not the most reliable technology.    Many organizations doing tape backups today trust that its working and don’t realize there is a problem until they need something from the tape.  The Gartner Group has estimated that 10 to 50 percent of all tape restores fail.   Furthermore, over 34% of organizations that backup their data to tape never test their restore process.  They went on to say that 77% of those companies who did test their backups, found backup failures.

With these kinds of negative statistics the question becomes “Why are companies still doing tape backups?”  The historical argument has been that it is the most cost-effective method to get data off-site and secure.  However, if the data is not restorable what is the benefit of having it?  A strong argument can now be made that disk-to-disk backups are becoming more cost-effective and are definitely more reliable and redundant then tape, but an organization still needs a way to get that data off-site. The solution is to replicate the data to the cloud.  With broadband connections now approaching LAN speeds, this becomes a viable option.

The benefits of using a hybrid cloud backup (disk-to-disk-to-cloud) include:

  • Reliability/Redundancy – Redundant arrays of inexpensive disk (RAID) provide on-site data redundancy in the case of hard disk failure.  Replicating this incremental/de-duplicated data off-site to another RAID array will provide an additional layer of redundancy and a second copy of the data.
  • Faster Restores – The always online and random access of hard disks allow for fast restoring of files making incremental backups more efficient.
  • Faster Backups – The incremental/de-duplication technology of the current software solutions teamed with fast hard disk and fast networks make these solutions much more efficient then tape.
  • Automated – No need for tapes to be switched and manually transported off-site and returned when needed.  Additionally, many organizations are using a tape courier service for this, which becomes quite costly.

If your organization is still using tape backup now is the time to re-evaluate your backup procedures and look at alternatives before you find out the hard way that you cannot effectively restore from your current backup solution.   Contact us today and we will help you design a reliable backup, restore, and recovery solution that improves performance and reduces IT staff overhead, all while minimizing your risk.