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Showing posts with label difference between cloud backup and cloud storage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label difference between cloud backup and cloud storage. Show all posts

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Cloud Storage And Cloud Backup: Are They Same Or Different?

Cloud has many definitions. It has different implications to different people. The differences between the varieties of services available on cloud are becoming blurrier and some of the cloud based service providers like it that way. It offers them broader appeal to potential clients but eventually is tainting the market for everyone. Often words like ‘cloud storage’ and ‘cloud backup’ are considered interchangeable but in reality they are ways apart from each other. This article has discussed about the finest differences between cloud storage and cloud backup facilities.


Cloud storage: It is an off-site storing space, hosted and managed by third-party where files are stored to be extracted later. It is a way to store your data in a virtual environment instead of your physical storing location. It saves your information in a remote database and is accessible over the internet.

Cloud storage is when a user accesses the cloud directly through web-based applications. These web-based applications are variants of REST or SOAP interface. Cloud storage targets to offer solutions to highly demanding storage problems of users. It is essentially a platform to provide users facilities of easy sharing of files, documents, photographs etc. It doesn’t offer backup facilities for your documents and not an ideal platform to store your mission-critical data.

  • It helps with managing huge amount of data and scale linearly in capacity to accommodate greater storage demands
  • Make stored data portable and available on-demand across geographical locations
  • Offering a highly resilient platform that is also capable of self healing to ensure stability for a long time
  • Offering a private and secured environment of multi-tenant
  • Offering users a scalable environment with pay-for-use model

Cloud storage component is still evolving and yet to be realized for its full potential. But it has shown ways to resolve the data storing issues faced by the huge amount of data generated every day.

Cloud backup: Cloud backup on the other hand is about creating a copy of your files, documents, financial information etc. in a remote server space or a datacenter where it is stored securely to be accessed when a disaster occurs. The cloud based backup solution is also called BURR or cloud backup, recovery, and restore. Some cloud storage facility also come with backup functionality but they aren’t essentially cloud backup facilities on the whole. A cloud storage service provider doesn’t offer data recovering and restoring facility at event of data loss. BURR by definition is an outsourced data backup, recovering and restoring service offered by a managed service provider (MSP). The data recovery facilities are available for less recent to more recent data (or, most recent data for data without local backup facilities).

As a result, backup services are charged by the amount of data stored; i.e. X amount of dollar for per gigabyte of data per month. It is apparently a more expensive service than cloud storage facilities and some customers tend to confuse between them. But the comparison is moot since the services offered are not of same nature. But clients who are only looking for a storing space to host their data can be better off using cloud storage instead of backup. Cloud backup is a more comprehensive service.

 
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