Finding The Best Backup Approach For Your Customers

By Chris Crellin, Senior Director, Product Management, Barracuda MSP

On-premise or cloud – what are the pros and cons for your clients?

The advent of cloud-based backup and data recovery services has made remote backup services easier to offer and deploy for MSPs. Interest is high, and one report predicts the cloud backup market will have a CAGR of 26 percent over the next several years. However, not every customer is best served by cloud-based backups, and even those who are still face a choice between public and private cloud resources; others may benefit from a hybrid approach.

Determining which backup approach is best for your customers will require a closer look at their application requirements and operational needs, including the type and amount of data being backed up, and how quickly they might need it restored in the event of a problem.

On-Premise Pros and Cons

On-premise backup solutions have well-known advantages — and a few disadvantages. How appropriate this backup approach is for an individual client will largely depend on what they need from their BDR provider.

With an on-premise setup, data is backed-up to a local drive or other media, putting all  data within reach. That can be either a blessing or a curse. The downsides of on-site backup include the cost of maintaining the infrastructure, vulnerability to local data breaches or natural disasters, and the labor required for creating backups and managing them.

On the other hand, on-premise backups provide fast recovery times and a greater degree of control over who has access to the data.