March 20th, 2012 by admin
As a telecom consultant and "VAR" (value added reseller) for my clients, I'm always on the lookout for new technology solutions I can offer my business customers.
By examining everything that comes along, I'm also in a position to consult with my customers when they get an offer from someone else that seems way too good to be true -- like what appears to be an almost unlimited amount of cloud backup storage for next to nothing.
Who Does the Backup & How It's Tested is More Important than Price
I recently ran across an interesting opportunity to
resell "unlimited" cloud backup storage to my business customers for just $59 per month. Now this seems like a pretty killer deal at face value. For just $59 per month I could give all my telecom consulting business clients "free data backup".
Or could I?
Hard drives "in the cloud" must be pretty cheap. I know this because big companies like Google sell me an extra 20 Gigs of storage a year for my Google Apps email storage for just $5 per year.
I'm pretty happy having 6 years and 60,000 old emails stored with Google because Google's a pretty big company and I'm fairly confident they know how to build and manage a data server farm. (And on top of that, backing up one user's email is fairly simple.)
But what about backing up "all the data" for "all your users"?
The biggest expense in cloud backup is not the cost of the actual hard drive sitting in a cloud somewhere. The biggest expense is making sure a human that knows what they're doing is backing up your critical business data properly (and not overwriting good backups with bad backups) so that when you need to restore your data, your backup data set is not corrupted.
So Who Are You Going to Trust?
While it appears that I can do it for you for practically free as we learned above, I'm thinking that maybe your best bet is to let me introduce you to the technology partners that have made proper cloud data storage backup part of their business.
Back in 2010, Bandwave Systems, a technology partner we do business with
rolled out an online data backup solution after evaluating most of the "almost free" cloud backup solutions on the market like Mozy, Livedrive and others.
After analyzing all the possible solutions they came to the conclusion that the "human interface" part of the data backup solution was the key to success. Does the person doing the backup know what they're doing, do they have access to competent live human support and are they interfacing with the solution using online displays that make the job easier to do right (and harder to do wrong)?
Since first looking into which vendors are best suited to manage our clients' cloud backup, we've met others who can do a competent job as well and are trusted and recommended by us.
Call ATEL for a "Cloud Storage" Solution Review for Your Company
Thinking cloud storage for your critical business data? Give us a call so we can get you connected to the right cloud data backup providers - at a low price you can actually afford!
Posted in: Cloud Computing (Hosting & Colocation), I.T. Services
