By Damien Garvey, Technical Account Manager at www.Backup-Technology.com
May 08, 2015

Backup-Technology Online Data Backup Expert Tips: Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part I

Business relationships are important. You have done your homework. You have researched and tested several solutions and settled on one that you thought was a great cloud backup vendor. Before you picked this company, you considered several factors, such as: technology, experience, financial status, reputation, security, compliance, support, certification, scalability, and trust. But, now, the vendor is taking it all for granted and is providing you with substandard services, resulting in not so good relationship.

Is your relationship with your cloud backup vendor healthy? If your business relationship starts to show some signs of stress, chances are the relationship will die at one point. Perhaps, it is time for you to gauge your business relationship.

If you notice any or all of the following points, you might be in a bad relationship:

1/ Data Backup – the company doesn’t backup all of your data across all operating systems, and on mobile devices. Are you using various backup solutions across operating systems (iOS, Windows, etc.) and across mobile devices?

2/ Appliance – Is the vendor appliance centric? Do you find yourself spending more than what you planned for appliances? Is the vendor requesting you to acquire additional appliances to match with your backed up data? Relying heavily on appliances might not be an ideal solution. Cloud centric solutions, however, offer unlimited scaling when your data grows. Is your data being tethered to an appliance instead, and as a result, forcing you to delete data and/or buy bigger appliance to gain extra space for your growing data?

3/ SLA – Service Level Agreements are very important. SLAs have a purpose and that is why a great deal of effort is put into preparing them. Does the vendor execute per signed and approved SLA?

4/ Price – the price the vendor is charging you varies all the time, and is complicated, and you can not figure out how the pricing model works. Is it per GB of raw or compressed data? Do you get credit for not recovering data, say, in the past one year?

5/ BLM – Does your vendor treats all data the same and back them all up in the same vault? Keep in mind that all data has the same value. The older a data gets, the less important it becomes. So, mission-critical data should be stored separately with clearly defined RTO and RPO while less important data should be stored in less expensive vaults. Intelligent software have the ability to automatically segment the data into these two tiers.

If you decide to move your services to a new vendor, make sure that you don’t end up with the same problems as the vendor you just switched from. Insist on asking the new vendor to help with the data migration, at least consultation help. Remember that choosing a cloud backup service provider is not a simple task; and the vendor you choose could end up causing you to go out of business.

In Part II, we will discuss other five factors that affect your relationship with your vendor, such as bandwidth throttling; data centre location; vendor lock-in; DRaaS; and periodic vendor research results.

About the Author: Damien Garvey is a Technical Account Manager at Backup-Technology, an Asigra powered cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions provider.

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Backup-Technology Online Data Backup Expert Tips: Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part II

In Part I, we discussed the five reasons that would make you leave your cloud backup vendor. They included:

1/ The lack of all operating systems support, mobile device support;
2/ Too much focus on appliances;
3/ Agreements not being executed as per SLAs;
4/ Confusing pricing structures; and
5/ Treating archived data and active data same way.

Continuing on this list, the remaining five reasons are:

6/ Bandwidth – Does your vendor throttle your bandwitdth connections? Remember that it takes days and weeks to recover data from an online depositories; and your Internet connection should be fast. Your backup vendor needs to optimise their bandwidth using the latest technologies for better data transfer in your network.

7/ Data Centre Location – At least one copy of your data should always be stored far away from your primary source data. It is recommended that your secondary storage to at least be 2,000 miles away from your primary location. Does this vendor have a geo-dispersed secondary data centre?

8/ Vendor Lock – Is there flexibility for your data? Do you have the ability to backup your data in private, public, or hybrid or a combination of two or more? Is it possible to deploy a third party solution as add on, for instance, salesforce.com, Google Apps, etc?

9/ DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service is not offered by this vendor due to the limitations of the software. In case of a disaster, you need to make sure that your data becomes available quickly and that you are covered for disaster recovery and business continuity. Your vendor always talks about backup and avoids discussing recovery. If DRaaS is not provided, how are you going to recover after a disaster hits? You must be able to instantly access critical data within minutes of a disaster.

10/ Periodic Research of the Vendor – Relationship stays healthy if it is monitored. You need to research about your vendor periodically. If too many complaints are published on the web, or at the local better business bureau (BBB) or at the consumer protection agency, it is a clear indication what is happening at the company. Check to see if the vendor is engaged in the industry. Does the vendor issue frequent meaningful press releases? Does it participate in forums and webinars? Does the vendor post educational blogs and articles on a regular intervals? How about case studies and whitepapers? Any social media activities?

Conclusion
Business relationships are critical for both a vendor and a client to be happy and stay in the relationship. Vendors should be responsible to delivering quality services as agreed to in the SLAs. Service providers should be able to deliver the same quality service to all clients no matter how small or big an organisation is; especially, in the case of a disaster or a virus attack. The vendor should try their best to understand the clients business needs, goals and challenges (including the IT competency levels) and work with you efficiently.

About the Author: Damien Garvey is a Technical Account Manager at Backup-Technology, an Asigra powered cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions provider.

 

 

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