The threat to your data comes in many forms, so it makes sense for SMBs to take full control. Dave Mitchell explains what to look for and reviews four high-quality contenders
The Network Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers
The ever-present threats of data breaches, ransomware attacks and natural disasters mean it’s never been more important for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to get their backup house in order. A complete data protection strategy is an essential business process and those businesses that don’t have one in place are foolishly putting their business and their staffs’ livelihoods at extreme risk.
This shouldn’t be challenging; there are lots of top-quality backup products on the market that are suitable for a wide range of environments and budgets. The best backup strategies use a hybrid mix of on-premises and cloud backup to provide the requisite number of copies, and the vast majority of products can combine both for simplified management.
This month’s buyer’s guide is aimed at SMBs that want to keep it in-house. We’ve tested on-premises business backup software solutions from four of the big names: Arcserve, Hornetsecurity, Nakivo and Veritas. We chose them as they’re all affordable options for SMBs and we test them in the lab to help you make the right data protection decisions.
A hybrid backup strategy that combines on-premises and off-site storage is a lot easier to manage than you might think, as the four products on review can do it all for you. The most common plan for reliable data protection is 3-2-1, where you retain three up-to-date copies of your data, back it up to two different types of media and keep one copy off-site.
This type of strategy gives you the best of all possible worlds. Your onsite backups provide fast recovery services for lost or deleted items. If you can’t access your main office for reasons such as theft, fire or flood, you’ll have the third copy safely stored off-site.
The cloud is a natural contender for off-site storage, and all good backup products offer support for a wide range of providers including Amazon and Microsoft Azure. You don’t have to use the cloud, though; many products offer replication services that can copy backups to your own remote storage devices such as NAS appliances and other storage servers.
It’s important to use a single backup product to protect all your sy
