Cloud-based offsite backup makes disaster recovery a breeze
Offsite backups of virtualised IT environment are now available in South Africa, with Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition being offered by several local service providers including CipherWave, Afrihost, Vox Telecom, Cybersmart, Triple 4 Consulting and Server Alliance.
“Veeam Backup and Replication is a great tool for creating safe, tested backups of a virtualised server environment,” explains Ian Faller of networking and hosted services provider CipherWave. “But there is always a need to keep offsite backups, and our clients who host their own servers love the idea that they no longer have to store a local backup to tape, then pay someone to take it away and store it. It can all be done in the cloud.”
For these clients, CipherWave creates a “seed load” full backup using an external hard driver, after which incremental backups are made to a schedule that suits the client’s needs.
“Organisations that aren’t changing huge amounts of data every day can happily use their quiet time overnight to update their offsite backups,” says Faller. “More transaction-heavy environments like banks or retailers prefer to use a high-speed fibre link to create backups throughout the day.”
“This is fulfilling a real need,” adds Faller. “Everyone needs offsite backups, and not just for compliance reasons. If a client’s building burns down overnight, we can restore their backups into our hosted virtual environment and have them up and running from our business continuity centre in hours. And it’s as easy as ticking a couple of boxes.”
Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition is also available globally through Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Rackspace, HP Cloud and more. Locally, Veeam is also in the process of finalising deals with more providers, says Veeam South Africa’s Jessica van Wyk. “The Cloud Edition of Veeam Backup & Replication has an open API and we are actively inviting local companies to plug in and become part of the ecosystem.”