Two things are most important for offsite backups. They have to be somewhere safe and they have to be somewhere else. To achieve these goals normally requires paying a service provider who has a secure offsite facility or purchase storage hardware and rent serviced space at an external location. Cloud computing services, such as what is offered by Amazon S3, provide a third option – use offsite storage capacity which is offered as a metered web service. The pay-as-you-go costs for this storage can be extremely attractive. This note looks at:
- How enterprises of all sizes are exploring disk-to-disk backup options that move away from the classic back up to tape and take the tapes offsite approach.
- How Amazon S3, as an example of cloud computing services, works for offsite storage.
- What has to be done to leverage S3 for small enterprise offsite backup.
Amazon S3 is not a backup product. It is a metered web service which provides secure, scalable, and inexpensive storage. The enterprise will still need to acquire applications and services in order to make S3 work for an optimized low cost backup solution.
