“Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other”, I remember these were the quotes of Bill Gates, where he laid the thought of advancement of technology in each one of us.
As Mr.Gates quoted, one such technology advancement that we witness in recent days is cloud technology.
Introduction of the concept of cloud has paved way for many businesses and they have started relying on the cloud for their day to day activities. There are many new advancements in the concept of cloud, but let me be specific only with the backup related concept. Now, mostly I get to hear that the cloud backup and cloud storage are all the same.
Being a product analyst, I talk a lot with my clients technically to know their requirements. Most of my clients claim that they need cloud backup.
After having a deep analysis of the conversation, I was able to recognize that some customers want a copy of their backup data to be transferred from local to the cloud as a secondary copy. And, some customers want to back up their data which is residing in the cloud.
Is it still confusing? fine then just continue reading.
Cloud Storage and Cloud Backup
There are two concepts hidden: one is cloud backup and the other is cloud storage.
Cloud Storage, as far as I am concerned it is nothing but a storage space in a cloud that holds your data that were sent from your onsite data center or from your local machine. For example, let us imagine there are 5 VMs (Virtual Machines) and 5 physical Windows machines and I want to back up all of them using third-party backup software.
The machines that are backed up will be stored in a storage device which is present in the local data center, if in case I need another copy of the backup data then I choose cloud to store my secondary copy of backup data, for the purpose of availability during the times of onsite disaster.
There is another scenario where, if I hold no local storage then I can directly store my data in the cloud, in this case, my primary storage is cloud itself.
From both the scenarios, the cloud acts as a storage medium, just like a NAS and DAS devices. I hope the concept of cloud storage is justified.
As per our second concept, the Cloud Backup is different from the first. In this case where the data that resides in the cloud itself is backed up. For example, I hold 5 AWS EC2 instances, and I want to back up these machines that reside in AWS cloud and store their back up data in another cloud or in the same cloud but different region/account. Here my source of backup data is cloud and my target storage is also the cloud.
There is another scenario where the source data is from the cloud and the target storage is physical storage in the local data center.
To justify my claim, I am pulling in Vembu Cloud Services to give a clear and better idea.
Vembu CloudDR: This is one of the disaster recovery options which is a part of Vembu BDR Suite, where you can transfer your backup data from on-premise backup server to Vembu cloud hosted in AWS. This Vembu CloudDR adheres with the concept of cloud storage.
Vembu Online Backup: This lets you backup all the files/folders, and MS applications directly to the Vembu cloud. Here the primary copy of data is directly stored in the cloud, this also brings in the concept of cloud storage.
Vembu SaaS backup: This lets you backup SaaS apps like Office 365 and G-Suite. Both are cloud-based applications that run in the cloud. When you perform a backup of these apps, here comes the concept of Cloud Backup, where the source data is the cloud. Further, the target is also in the cloud which also brings in the concept of cloud storage.
Vembu BDR in Cloud: You can run the Vembu BDR server in your cloud instance. For example: Install Vembu BDR in any of your AWS EC2 instances. Now backup other instances through this server. With the help of Vembu OffsiteDR, you can have the secondary copy of your instance backups in your on-premise data center or on any other cloud platform. Here, the concept of cloud backup comes in.
Further, you can see for yourself how Vembu differentiates between the concept of Cloud Backup and Cloud Storage by downloading the full-featured free trial version of Vembu BDR Suite for 30 days!
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