A Tale of Two Services: Cloud Backup vs. Cloud Storage

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Cloud Backup vs. Cloud Storage

When organizations are looking to move to the cloud, they may hear “cloud backup” and “cloud storage” and think they’re synonymous. However, this is not the case! Cloud backup and cloud storage are two separate services, and organizations should know what they are and how it can better serve their organizational needs.

What is Cloud Backup?

Cloud backup is a strategy for backing up data that involves sending a copy of the data over a private or public network to an off-site server. This will allow easy access to the data in the event that it suddenly needs to be recovered.

What is Cloud Storage?

Cloud storage, as defined by Microsoft, is “a service that lets you store data by transferring it over the Internet or another network to an offsite storage system maintained by a third party.” This includes holding and backing up emails, pictures, videos, and other personal files of an individual. This means that businesses can securely transfer and store data files internally without needing a lot of physical hard drives to store their information.

So, Which is Best for You?

Well, it depends. Different scenarios call for different services.

If you have important data that could be compromised by a catastrophe, backup would keep your data intact since it is stored, or “backed up,” to a third-party server. For example, say you had important healthcare information on your organizational hard drive but a storm came and destroyed your office and all your information. If it was backed up to the cloud you would be able to get all of your organization’s pertinent information instantly. Unfortunately, though, you’d still need to get a new laptop.

On the other hand, cloud storage can act as a hard drive for your organization and theoretically store an unlimited number of employee files. For example, if you had employees use laptops that could only store 256GB of data, but they needed 2TB of space for work, you could use cloud storage to store and access all of their files on their organization laptops. And this is all without having to spend extra money on more hard drives!

There you have it, you now know the differences between cloud backup and storage and examples of when you’d want to use each.

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