As a CSP, we answer this question daily. And we always answer the question with the question:
“What do you want to accomplish with your Backup Product and Disaster Recovery plan?”
For this article, we are not going to list all the Backup/DR products in the market today with an evaluation for each one. There isn’t a need to do that as we have done our due diligence through research and testing and have narrowed the field to 4 products that offer secure, reliable recovery at very reasonable price points.
Backup
First of all, solely using onsite backup is a huge risk and we do not recommend it being your only backup plan. Having an offsite location for backup is so important, the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) recommends you follow the 3-2-1 rule. We highly recommend utilizing the cloud for your off site, second location. If you’re not sure if the cloud is right for your business, then read Why the Cloud is a Good Option from our blog page.
With the variety of backup products in the market today, there are 2, really great choices that cover a multitude of environments and offer a wide range of recovery options: Veeam and Acronis Cyber Cloud.
These 2 products can give granular recovery for files and folders while also handling mission critical applications such as O365, Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL. Not only do these products work very well, but user experience is great. The setup is extremely easy, are easy to utilize and manage, and restoring your environment is very straight forward.
Both Veeam and Acronis have built in methods to utilize the 3-2-1 backup rule and automate sending your data to your offsite recovery platform. In a DR event, utilizing a cloud provider like Net3 can give you the ability to recover your on-premise environment to our cloud while you fix/replace what failed.
Disaster Recovery
So now you have a backup in place, the data is safe. But what about those mission critical, customer facing, can’t have downtime, we need it now applications Since they are archival in nature, backups typically take some time to recover and bring online. That doesn’t always provide the best recovery time and can make your end users a little antsy.
In regard to true business continuity – replication is what you really need for rapid recovery times.
For disaster recovery to cloud, we recommend Zerto and Actifio. Veeam and Acronis are both dipping their foot into replication to cloud, but it’s not up to par yet with Zerto and Actifio. Both Zerto and Actifio offer single digit second recovery points with single digit minute recovery times, which is the fastest recovery you can get today.
With Actifio and Zerto, the user experience is also great. Single portal sign in, complete view of your entire environment, and they are consumption based - which means you only pay for the data you are replicating. Actifio isn’t hugely known in the market and because of that, the learning curve is about 1-2 weeks (in which Net3 provides the training), but it is a top notch product and easy to manage once on-boarding is complete.
Not only did we take in to account functionality and ease of use, but we also looked at price. As a CSP, we’ve done the research for product costs and licensing fees that we would have extend to our customers. We understand every business has a budget and at Net3, we offer flexible pricing plans and alternative pricing models. Our goal was to offer the best Backup and Disaster Recovery products in the market at different price points so businesses don’t have to sacrifice performance due to budget.
Providing a slew of products just to provide them isn’t our goal.
Providing top notch products coupled with elite customer service is our goal.
If you want more information on which of these Backup & Disaster Recovery products would work best for your business,
visit the links below or contact us today!
