The cloud can provide significant benefits in terms of improving application performance and reducing capital and operational costs. But cloud technologies also introduce a number of complex challenges for cloud backup, recovery, long-term retention and disaster recovery.
Speed of backups
Large backups may take many hours, impacting application performance and increasing the cost of WAN bandwidth required to backup servers to cloud storage.
Compliance issues
Managing compliance is more difficult in the cloud, as organizations have less control over their data, making it harder to demonstrate compliance with a wide variety of regulatory frameworks.
Distributed environments
In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, cloud backup may need to cover data that resides in a variety of locations, while also integrating backups with data from virtualized environments and on-premises servers.
Cost of storage
While cloud computing may offer cost-savings over the expense of purchasing, installing and managing on-premises hardware, those efficiencies can be easily wiped out by the cost of a large backup storage footprint in the cloud.
Management complexity
All of these issues can combine to make managing cloud data and cloud backup more arduous, time-consuming and costly, further mitigating the cost-savings and other benefits of moving infrastructure to the cloud.