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.

As a premier provider of data protection and backup solutions for organizations of every size, Dell provides cloud data protection and cloud data backup solutions that help organizations protect information while providing greater operational efficiency, resiliency and scalability for digital transformation in the cloud.

Dell EMC solutions enable:

• Cloud backup that can eliminate tape backup and enable consumption of low-cost public cloud object storage for all backup copies.
• Cloud Disaster Recovery that delivers simpler, faster recovery with lower infrastructure and administrative costs, copying backed-up VMs from their on-premises environments to the public cloud and orchestrating DR testing and workload failovers to the cloud.
• Management of long-term retention to the cloud with advanced deduplication to minimize storage footprints.
• Cloud backup and protection for customers of VMware Cloud on AWS, delivering a single solution that can protect hybrid cloud workloads, simplify administration and lower TCO.

Dell EMC solutions offer significant benefits for data protection and cloud backup.

• Faster backups: Dell EMC technology can significantly accelerate cloud backup.
• Less hardware: Dell EMC cloud backup enables reduction in required backup hardware.
• Flexible solutions: Software and technology from Dell can be mixed and matched to create a custom cloud backup solution for any organization.
• Ease-of-use: Dell makes cloud data management and backup easier. With a powerful policy engine, Dell EMC cloud backup solutions help to automate processes and minimize time required from IT staff. 
• Policy-driven compliance: Policy-driven backup management significantly simplifies the task of demonstrating compliance with regulatory standards.
• Massive scalability: Designed for any size cloud infrastructure, Dell EMC cloud backup solutions are highly scalable to manage large numbers of instances and backups.
• Cost savings: Faster backups, less hardware and easier management all combine to significantly reduce the cost of cloud backup.

What is cloud backup?

Cloud backup is an umbrella term for backup systems that copy or replicate important business data to storage in the cloud. Data may be copied from on-premises infrastructure, virtualized environments or from other cloud storage sites.

What are common cloud backup use cases?

Common use cases include:

• Backup to cloud - Backup from on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud, including short-term backups for operational recovery and long-term backups for compliance.
• Long-term retention - Backup from on-premises infrastructure to public cloud object storage for long-term retention and compliance requirements.
• In-cloud backup - Backup from workloads running in public cloud virtual machine instances to public cloud object storage.

Why is deduplication important for cloud backup?

Storing data in the cloud can be expensive in both the short term and long term. Successful deduplication can ensure that only the minimal amount of data required is backed up to the cloud, helping to reduce storage costs.