As IT organisations look to be more agile, lower costs provide the opportunity for innovation, many are looking to at their Backup solutions. And while enterprise cloud Backup solutions have been available for some time, adoption is now increasing across all sizes of organisations. There are many questions about cloud Backup solutions, in this comprehensive FAQ we aim to give you the information you need to understand the options and select a Backup solution to suit your organisation and its data protection strategy.

It is the process of having your files and information stored on a separate drive or media to your main productions systems. It is part of Continuity Management, an essential part of every business plan.

Traditional Backups involve copying data to a media – usually tape, and then transporting the media to the remote data storage location off-site. Not only are these solutions outdated, but there are also multiple reasons why traditional tape/drive Backup methods can’t meet the needs of a modern “always-on” organisations. 

Cloud Backup is the name given to the Backup process of transferring a copy of your files, applications or database to a secondary, offsite location over the internet so that your data is safe in a remote location protected from on-site incidents.

Backup as a service (BaaS), is a way of storing data remotely in the cloud and having a service provider such as SureSkills design, manage and maintain the infrastructure, support services and reporting.

Most Backup solutions allow for Backups of all data and various applications depending on the computing and data environment. Here is a list of the most common data backed up: 

• Emails and communications
• ERP systems, Bookings systems
• Credit Card Transactions and Receipts
• Client Information Files and CRM
• Invoicing, Accounts Receivable & Payable
• Personnel Files and Payroll
• Project Management files
• Other Frequently Updated Files

How frequently always depends on the results of a business impact analysis. When performing this analysis, you’ll create a series of scenarios of data loss. These scenarios can then be used to predict the size and scope of the losses you might incur if specific data is partially or fully lost? 

That said, in most cases you can Backup your data as frequently as you like or can afford. Backups can be made manually or can be scheduled as a single or recurring instance made daily, weekly, monthly or on a custom schedule. Schedules can be updated or cancelled at any time. 

Data-retention depend on where you want to roll back to and is dictated by your data retention policy (a set of practices and guidelines). For example, a typical Backup solution would have daily retention for seven days, while weekly schemes hold data for one month, and monthly schemes hold data for one year. At the end of each period, the oldest data set is rotated out and the first "delta Backup" made becomes the oldest available restore point.

• When was the data created and when was it last used or referred to 
• What is the purpose of the data collected, to justify retention and disposal periods 
• What regulatory obligations do you have to comply with 
• Do we have a way to identify the same data across different data sources 
• Consider all data, everywhere, from all data types, stores, and sources 
• Aim to have a unified, intuitive interface to view the state of data

The first Backup is a "Seed" (a complete and full Backup), the next and subsequent Backups are referred to as "deltas" (changes only), and are considered a "full Backup" in that you should be able to restore all or individual files from either the seed or delta.

A Delta Backup to a Seed back up delivers a "full Backup" each time, but saves computing and storage space on the Backup server thereby decreasing the amount of time each subsequent Backup takes to complete.

Type	Pros	Cons	Backup time	Restore Time	Storage Space
Full	Full copy of data Most see it as best protection	Time consuming Requires a lot of storage space	Slowest	Fast	High
Incremental	Less time and storage space is used than full Backup	Takes time to restore You will need all of the Backups in the chain to make a full restore	Fast	Moderate	Lowest
Differential	Shorter time to restore than a Differential Backup	Can grow big in size compared to Incremental Backup	Moderate	Fast	Moderate
Mirror backup	Fast as it copies files and folders to the destination without any compression	Lo needs larger storage space Only the latest version of the data is stored	Fast	Fast	High

This depends on your supplier and software. By default, SureSkills Backup solutions encryption happens over the wire (OTW) with AES 256-bit encryption. You can also choose to store data in encrypted format using AES 256-bit.

By default, SureSkills state-of-the-art technology (Commvault) is able to handle most open files running on the OS. In rare cases, if Backups fail because of open file limitation, there are plug-ins to get improved open files handling. Generally, we don’t need an open-file plug-in unless we see errors in your Backups for open files, in which case we can address the issue as it arises.

It is reliable and easy to manage - when your cloud Backup is set up, it requires little effort to maintain. 

There are normally cost savings for small to mid-sized organizations versus traditional media backups. 

It is considered secure as the data is held off-site on a separate network, helping to protect your business from certain types of cyber threats like ransomware. Even if you suffer a data breach onsite, you have access to your secure backups in the cloud. On top of that, SureSkills offer 24/7 monitoring, management, and reporting. Ensuring that your data is safe at all times. 

To most businesses the best advantages of cloud backup is that it’s scalable. You can store as much or as little information as you need, and you only pay for what you use.

In the past, most organisations relied on tape and spinning disks (HDD) for backups, maintaining multiple copies of their data and storing at least one at an offsite location. Today always-on digitally transforming world, tape backups in offsite repositories often cannot achieve the necessary business agility to restore business-critical data. For this reason, many organizations are turning to companies like SureSkills for cloud-based backup (BaaS) solutions.