In the modern world of digital revolution, there is an ever increasing threat to safety and integrity of data. Mission critical information in the digital format is perpetually vulnerable to impacts caused by acts of God, technical failure, power outages, data theft, hacking, and other cyber crimes to name just a few.
Relevance of backup and storage solutions
Acts of God such as mudslide, snow-storms, earthquakes, or floods often strike without warnings. There is always a lurking danger of permanent loss of data in such cases, if the same is not efficiently replicated at an offsite backup facility. In fact there are as many as twelve natural disasters reported by FEMA that struck the regions from Florida to Alaska in the span of just three months during 2012.
Many organizations continue to nurture a bit of skepticism about the prospect of losing control of their business critical data in a cloud environment. This explains why a huge majority of enterprises have not shifted their digital assets to the cloud. There are several factors including the presence of fly by night cloud operators, unrealistic promotional offerings, and an uneasy sense of losing physical rein over one’s own data.
In addition to this there exists a considerable confusion with regards to a clear differentiation between cloud storage and cloud backup. Although these two services may sound deceptively similar, there are multiple factors that differentiate them even if few similarities do exist.
The good news is that you are not expected to choose between cloud storage and cloud backup since both the solutions have their own applicability. These differ in terms of breadth and also complement each other for an assured safety of your data.
Cloud backup secures all types of personal files at the most basic level. It is designed to build subset of the files that can be shared and synched across multiple users or a broad spectrum of devices. Choice of the right storage solution depends only upon the required features.
Key attributes of cloud storage
Cloud storage facilitates storing or sharing of files that need to be selected manually. You can choose between two different types of storages including a direct access to a host site or via an integrated system involving your computer for ease of editing the files in cloud right from your machine.
If the work environment consists of sharing of files among colleagues, friends, co-workers or workloads that need collaboration, then an option of cloud storage can be the most gratifying one. Additionally, one must note that a cloud storage solution is not created as a substitute for a full backup and has considerable restriction as far as the capacity of cloud storage is concerned.
Features of cloud backup
There are many cloud backup solutions that can create copies of files that are originally saved in your machines to ensure availability of such files in the event of loss of original files. Cloud backup is essentially designed for restoration of the original files subsequent to server failure, crashed hard drives, of virus attacks.
Cloud backups are regarded to be right solutions for protection of huge volumes of data as against the limited capacity offered by cloud storage that can only backup the files selected by users. Cloud backups are governed by extremely large capacity and can be accessed for securing almost all data on your computer.
Service providers of cloud backup solutions offer guaranteed and automated backing up of your data by obviating the need to manually select the same. Cloud storage and cloud backup are complimentary to each other. However several features that are included in cloud storage are also part of cloud backup services.
Cloud backups provide seamless access to the data via internet and by using smart devices such as internet enabled phones or laptops. These are also able to reduce dependence on email attachments and flash drives by enabling use of free cell phone apps.
In spite of this, the principal objective of cloud backup is to offer flawless security against data loss due to various reasons. Users of cloud backup are able to restore everything that is prone to be lost due to server crash or on account of data compromise.
To conclude
Thanks to a wide array of cloud backup solutions, users can leverage best of both the worlds including security of cloud backups and supreme convenience of cloud storage.
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