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How to Start Your Own Cloud Backup Service

By Muayyad Shehadeh

Whether you are a service provider, software vendor, IT consultant or a small company wanting to start your own cloud backup service, the process is not always an easy one. Backing up data is not a small task and starting a backup service can be very complex. There are many services in the market claiming to be number one, but how do you choose the right one?

Before you start this venture you should consider the following aspects; there are many tricks in this business, so you must know exactly what you are doing and how to choose the right solution for you. First you will need to decide on a cloud backup solution provider, there are many in the market, each offering a variety of solutions and technologies.

One of the initial steps should be deciding where you would like to store your data. You can break this option down into three categories:

1. Start your own data center: This can prove to be costly, requires a lot of bandwidth, and demands management of hardware and replicating the backups among a number of locations. This direction will require a large investment of time and money. It is not recommended unless you have a large, experienced team and a lot of finance.

2. Trust the solution provider's storage facility: This can sometimes require a lot of unknowns; it usually contains RAID 5 or RAID 6 disks. It is impossible to be 100 percent sure about how your data will be treated; will it be stored on an offsite location in case a natural disaster hit the facility? Service providers can sometimes use a public cloud infrastructure such as Amazon S3, Rackspace, or Microsoft Azura, this is a better solution since it provides a lot more safety and better treatment of the data.

3. Public cloud location: If the solution provider permits this, it is the best option. You can choose to use a top class public, pure cloud infrastructure such as Amazon S3 which will eliminate the need to invest in costly hardware and bandwidth. They will take the hassle and stress out of the cloud by automatically handling the replication of data throughout several locations and controlling and managing everything. Many come backed with an SLA (service level agreement) which will guarantee 99.9999 percent uptime and data safety.

Many backup solutions are not in fact that; a real cloud solution is a lot more than just uploading files to the cloud. A real cloud backup solution should be managed completely from the cloud and offer an ease of mind when it comes to your customers. It should work without intervention so that you are not constantly hassled with problems such as speed issues and bugs.

Things to look for when you select your solution:

• Complete cloud management is a must. You should be able to manage, control, and handle everything straight from the cloud.

• Speed is one of the major things to look for in a backup solution. Many well known products have many features but are very slow. Read comparisons and benchmarks to make sure you are getting a feature rich yet fast solution. It usually helps to look for a variety of performance modes that are used to help speed up the backup and restore process.

• The software should run silently in the background with no manual settings and no performance impact.

• Deployment and installation should be done from the cloud in as few steps as possible. NEVER look at a solution that requires manually installing and defining jobs on individual computers.

• One of the benefits of the cloud is mobility. The solution you choose should integrate with all major mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc)

• Restore is just as crucial in a backup solution as the backup itself. Make sure there are a variety of restore options that include way more than just dragging and dropping a file off the cloud onto your computer. It should be straight forward, fast, and easy.