3 Reasons to Move Long-Term Retention to the Cloud

Legacy LTR products are inefficient. You can only point to one tape at a time to archive, and IT has to catalog meticulously so nothing gets lost. Backups in hand, you contract with an off-site storage vendor that sets retention policies upfront before picking up and promising to keep your data safe. Yet without automation and search capabilities, off-site, physical media retrieval is time-consuming and costs extra because staff is required to consult the catalog to find what’s needed. Instead, deploying a cloud-native solution that seamlessly integrates with popular public clouds — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — simplifies LTR in just a few clicks and without bolt-on gateways. This means you can set and instantly change policies to meet regulatory requirements; automatically catalog your data and simultaneously send it to multiple locations for geo-specific business needs, and automate your workflows through APIs. With instant global search, you can always retrieve your organization’s information — when you need it.

With legacy LTR products, capital and operational costs rise as the volume of your backup data grows. Data storage is increasingly taken up by copies that needlessly increase space and cost — and lack of sharing between siloed infrastructure makes your mass data fragmentation problem worse. In contrast, choosing an LTR solution that works in the cloud can be more cost-effective and can help reduce your data footprint. Deploying a modern backup solution with cloud-native integration and support for global deduplication and compression boosts storage efficiency. Unlike legacy tape solutions that don’t offer data deduplication, data migrated to the public cloud using a solution that supports deduplication can eliminate archiving duplicate copies in the public cloud. This can also reduce data transfer times and costs.

Backups contain valuable business information. Yet legacy products result in data silos that prevent you from finding and using all of your data for actionable business insights. Shining a light on dark data to support organizations’ e-discovery, compliance, and analytics requirements makes good business sense. Therefore, a unified backup solution needs to let you easily analyze massive data sets to derive insights and avoid compliance violations. You should be able to run applications — from those that analyze patterns to those that detect vulnerable passwords — atop a platform that helps you get more out of your data. Ideally, any modern solution provides even more capabilities: an application software-development kit (SDK) that allows you to build your own apps to run against your backup data plus a marketplace for you to share your apps and discover those contributed by others, as well.