What do real users say about their backup and recovery software?
With cyber threats remaining a constant challenge, backup and recovery software is an important part of any enterprise IT environment. According to MSPmentor, this focus on backup and recovery software will only continue to grow, due to the sheer increase of data that needs protection, as well as developments such as the Internet of Things, big data, and data analytics.
IT professionals interested in backup and recovery have a wide range of solutions to choose from. With such a wide variety of solutions that offer different features and benefits, choosing the right backup and recovery solution for your company can seem like a daunting task.
To help make the process easier for you, we have turned to the PeerSpot community for their advice on how to choose the right backup and recovery software, based on their personal experiences.
Question: When evaluating backup and recovery software, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
Tomas D., IT Architect, CGI, Tech Services Company
“There are several things to consider: The ability to have the flexibility to fulfill requirements; Recovery Time Objectives (RTO, how to fulfill different requirements that the business has to restore data that meet the requirements of "how long time can the business live without the data"); Recovery Point Objectives (RPO, how to fulfill different requirements that the business has about how much data to lose in case of different incidents); Backup Time Objectives (BTO, how efficient the solutions are to protect the data); Resource utilization (How cost-efficient the solutions are with the resources utilization), data reduction inline/post, progressive incremental forever with/without rebuilding base data; Maintenance tasks on the solutions (data retention managements), protecting the solution, upgrading off/online; Support from vendor; Price of the solution; Limitation of licenses, gentlemen's agreement, or hard limits; The ability to use different retention policies, exclude content, use different storages, extra copies, etc.; Security of the solution.”
Cheyenne H., Owner, Cyber Protect, Tech Services Company
“When deploying backup solutions we look at features that work the way we expect them to. Data should be deduplicated to retain quick efficient backups while actually being able to restore without issue. Restoring databases, mailboxes, and domain controllers is particularly difficult for some well-known vendors. We have observed many instances of potential clients having failed restores with "successful" backups. So, having reliable restores is a must. Test often! Backups must be flexible to meet customer needs with custom retention times while providing quick restore options.
The UI must be easy to use or mistakes will be made during the configuration of backup jobs.”
Raul G., PMO y CIO, Tecnologías de Información
“From the last Backup of the data you have until the moment you apply. The contingency is your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and after you apply the contingency and until you restore the data it is your RTO (Recovery Time Objectives). It seems to me that it is more important to consider the RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) because it is always the longest in the process, if we saw it as a Critical Path the RTO this is your Critical Path.”
Johann F., IBM Spectrum Protect Expert, Non Tech Company
“I think that the most important is that you know what your environment is looking like and then challenge the tool against it to ensure to not multiply the solution for your Backup & recovery strategy. Having too many solutions, for the same will give headache to your admins' fellows to put in place and surely even more when you will face a disaster to be recovered, could it be ransomware, or simple DC down (no matter on/off-premise).”
Question: What is the best next generation backup tool?
Simon C., Cyber Security Advisor, DirectorFortNet UK Ltd
“Everyone has recommended good reliable solutions, Rubrik, Veeam, Druva would be our top choices. You need to decide how quickly you need to get a solution deployed and running, how much you want to spend over the next 3-5 years, does your business have any reason not to be in the cloud, do you need to backup every Whirlpool location and endpoint or are the individual regions responsible for their own local data, how quickly and how often you need to upload and download, are you operating M365, do you have any relationship with AWS and perhaps you would like to buy a solution via AWS Marketplace?”
Steffen H., Administrator, Neuberger Gebäudeautomation GmbH
“Here is my recommendation: Rubrik. Install it wherever you want, cloud, datacenter, edge, it is your choice. Enjoy the google search experience if you are looking for a file to retrieve. Don't know the market share but that is just statistics anyway and bound to be old news.
As you are working for a pretty big company you may want to know that HomeDepot has deployed rubrik on over 2200 locations just in 3 days time. Preparation for that stunt with significant longer. But that is just how much you can do with automation on that product. Will change your point-of-view on backup, for sure.”
Chris C., Lead Infrastructure Architect, ThinkONTech Company
“If you are looking for a solution for a hybrid environment that covers the solutions mentioned then Veeam is the way to go. They cover both Hyper-V and VMware as well as all the cloud platforms with their appliances.
Yes there are other solutions and as mentioned ensure you understand what you are trying to achieve when it comes to backup and recovery.
I want to highlight that each product fits better depending on company size, so CIO's are the ones that should take the attention the most and understands the company current status and future growth before they decide a technology. It is hard to look for easy to install and manage products if the company growing fast or it is already an Enterprise, we are talking on so many layers of high-end storage and high availability solutions that is not simple to manage and even worst to fit the backup time window. I am worried that so many companies are looking to reduce costs and simplify but they need to understand that more and more we are producing high valuable data that must have safe copy. A hacker don't need to get into production system (the ones that have the most money invested), they can simple talk to poor and cheapest "backup boy" to get into the system and gather a copy of all production data and share with others. Really, from my experience I can certain say that nowadays 95% of mid to large companies can be easily hacked on their backup software as they chose the easiest/cheapest solutions. If you are a CIO and you took the decision to low cost, it is better to review your decision depending on how worth is your data information.