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NOVEMBER, 2017

The responsibilities of an IT professional seem easy to an inexpert eye, but they include key elements which keep the organization up and running. From cloud storage to Backup, an IT professional needs to focus on greater things than troubleshooting emails; like figuring out how to adjust the existent infrastructure set-up to meet the demands of the digital world. Those demands mean that the organization is up on Big Data, the Internet of Things, mobile accessibility and cloud computing.

All this seems well theory-crafted, but in reality the entirety of obtaining all this requires a lot of resources, time and finances which an average organization just does not have. The growing storage needs of an organization are met by using cloud based services. However, these solutions need to be looked in depth to recognize the precise solution fit for your organization.

Managed Backup in the Cloud

A Managed Backup is provided by a service provider who provisions and manages all backup and recovery operations on end user behalf. The service provider is in charge of all the intricate operations under managed backup.

• Provisioning
• Consulting
• Backup and Recovery Management

There are many advantages of using a managed backup as provided by a service provider.

• Easy and Reliable: Customers are free from the hassle of setting up their own data center for data storage; an intact well balanced storage solution provided to the customers with ease; configuring and provisioning done by the cloud service provider.
• No Technical Knowledge Required: Customers do not need to have any technical knowledge in backup technology and virtualization to create backup plans and perform backups of their machines.

The targeted audience for managed backups include ‘Value-Added Resellers’ and ‘Large System Integrators’.

Value-Added Resellers

Storage service providers like StoneFly, take care of all the backup plans of such resellers so that the middleman providing service may not have to allocate any resources to the operations in turn. Full disaster recovery solution is provided at low costs which for small, medium and large enterprises.

Large System Integrators

The StoneFly managed backups confer a lot of benefits on the users as hybrid cloud solutions with integration with the likes of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Veeam are also provided. Such cloud backup solutions will save a lot of time and resources for the customers since all the backup operations will automatically be managed by StoneFly.

Self-Service Backup in the Cloud

In a self-service backup, the service provider provides the service but enables the end user staff to manage all the backup and recovery operations on their own. The operations of provisioning and consulting are in the hands of the service provider. While the operations of backup and recovery management are in the hands of the end users.

Self-service backup confers many advantages on the customer.

• Lower Direct Cost: Customers will not have to bear the direct expense of using a certain service provider for backup.
• Increased Flexibility: For instance, a self-service backup by StoneFly using the Cloud Connect to Microsoft Azure Storage or Amazon AWS or any public or private cloud. Customers can configure and provision the backup themselves. Hence, there are no geographical restrictions on where the storage will be provisioned.

However, there are some disadvantages of using a self-service backup.

• High Technical Knowledge: Customers will require knowledge of backup and virtualization to create backup plans and perform backups.
• Increased Resources: Customers will require sufficient resources to allocate their backup operations.

The targeted audience for self-service backups include hosting and cloud service providers who can have easy access to the services provided by StoneFly. A major benefit to these providers of using StoneFly as a self-service backup is the increased flexibility they will be provided in terms of backup and recovery options. Moreover, you do not have to use your own resources to manage backups and backup infrastructure.