Backup Your Cloud Services to Protect Your Data

Jason Reid Blogs

Is the mission critical data you host with your cloud service provider truly safe? Backup your cloud services to ensure that you don’t get caught out.

Backup Cloud Services Blog

Many of us store mission critical data with cloud service providers such as Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services. The flexibility, functionality, and value for money they offer have made them an increasingly popular hosting option for businesses and individuals.

But how safe is your data that sits in the cloud? Recent high profile incidents have highlighted the need to backup cloud services. The data held with your cloud service provider may not be as safe as you think.

123-reg Outage

In April 2016, popular web hosting provider 123-reg suffered an outage that affected a significant number of customers. The issue affected subscribers to the company’s Virtual Private Server (VPS) service, on which hundreds of UK-based websites are hosted.

Although the outage was initially attributed to a connectivity issue, it soon became clear that customer data had been deleted as a result of an issue with a clean-up script.

The result? Significant downtime that lasted several days for a large number of customers. And what’s worse, many customers lost data permanently.

Why You Should Backup Your Cloud Services

During the outage, 123-reg customers were advised to restore data from their own backups if they had them. Although some customers subscribed to backup services provided by 123-reg, these also suffered from issues.

So what’s the lesson? We believe the 123-reg outage demonstrates that, although cloud service providers offer hosting services with high fault tolerance and strong SLAs, they cannot be relied upon entirely to protect your business’s mission critical data.

Businesses that choose to backup cloud services, through offerings such as AssureStor’s backup2cloud service, will gain confidence in the safety of their data. Here are three reasons why: –

  1. Replicating to a secondary infrastructure, with no dependence on your cloud service provider, will provide assurance that your data is safe even in the event of an issue with your hosting service.
  2. Don’t forget that, in many cases, your cloud service provider is taking backups for themselves – not for you. Backup your cloud services to ensure that you have control over your backup data and its availability to you.
  3. Many 123-reg customers who subscribed to their backup service still had to wait days to retrieve their backed up data. Backup your cloud services to restore data and services in hours, not days.

In Summary

As businesses and individuals gain more confidence in the hosting options delivered by cloud service providers, we see a continuing rise in their uptake. However, this confidence shouldn’t result in complacency: your cloud hosted data still needs to be backed up, and there are good reasons why you shouldn’t rely on your cloud service provider alone to deliver this.

AssureStor’s backup2cloud service gives you confidence in the security, integrity, and availability of your cloud backup data. For information on how we help businesses and individuals backup cloud services, please contact us.