The last few years have demonstrated how critical cloud adoption is for business growth. Year by year, the amount of data and IT resources moving to the cloud continues to increase. According to Statista, over 60% of all corporate data was stored in the cloud in 2022. There are multiple reasons driving this digital transformation — accessibility, mobility, scalability, responsiveness and cost-effectiveness being some of the prominent ones.
The cloud also enables businesses to manage data with improved security and establish quick data recovery in the event of a disaster, thereby ensuring business continuity. It also encourages the practice of geo-redundancy and disaster recovery (DR) testing to weave a safety net around your business-critical data — so that all your “eggs” aren’t in one basket and the data is readily recoverable.
However, moving IT workloads and data to the cloud isn’t without risk. Since data is distributed across multiple locations, it’s difficult for organizations to closely monitor data and traffic, opening the door to advanced threat vectors and potential data loss. Besides the IT complexity, the unpredictability in costs — especially around variable, per-incident charges such as egress costs — can lead to vendor lock-in and ultimately hinder innovation and growth.
That’s where dedicated, purpose-built cloud services, tuned specifically to the backup and disaster recovery use case, alleviate the data protection challenges associated with general-use public clouds. With Unitrends Cloud Services, you get straightforward, low-touch backup, retention and disaster protection for simplified, hassle-free management. Unitrends Cloud delivers automated, long-term data retention, geo-redundant immutable storage and remote DR spin-up (assisted by cloud experts with DRaaS) at a predictable cost.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the various cloud offerings provided by Unitrends.
Unitrends Forever Cloud
Purpose-built for cost-effective off-site retention, Forever Cloud provides superior protection than public clouds can and comes without egress fees or upcharges. Forever Cloud works in tandem with on-premises Unitrends physical or virtual backup appliances to provide off-site, long-term retention. Cloud storage capacity is based on your protected on-premises footprint and required retention period (90 days through infinite retention), providing a predictable cost for the lifecycle of your backups. Data in the Unitrends cloud is encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption in-flight and at-rest and stored on immutable blocks, meaning no external source can change, modify or delete your data. Automated, WAN-optimized replication, powered by Unitrends backup appliances, saves hours of IT time, ensuring your data is backed up and retained in compliance with recovery point objective (RPO), retention periods and other regulatory requirements.
Optimal efficiency and industry-leading resiliency for maximum uptime are two of the most crucial features Forever Cloud brings to the table. That’s why when Donelson Christian Academy faced severe downtime issues due to a tornado strike back in 2020, the institution relied on Unitrends for the data retrieval process. Unitrends Cloud ensured minimal downtime by delivering a successful recovery, making it easy for the organization to get back up and going once the connectivity was restored.
Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service
Unitrends Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) — tailor-made for IT professionals — keeps your business up and running in the event of a disaster by providing effortless DR. Delivered as white glove service, Unitrends DRaaS provides rapid spin-up of your critical systems and applications in the secure Unitrends Cloud. Working as an extension of your team, Unitrends cloud experts execute your DR runbook at the time of disaster declaration to recover enrolled workloads in the Unitrends cloud and help you reroute network traffic. All this comes at a cost significantly lower than building and managing off-site DR.
Moreover, it provides flexible, cost-efficient data protection with guaranteed one-hour or 24-hour recovery for critical applications. This allowed a national manufacturer to maintain their business continuity during a hurricane event. Unitrends was able to provide DRaaS spin-up immediately to them, ensuring their critical multitiered ERP application was functional in the cloud without any interruption. Also, the organization was hit with a Crypto Locker ransomware attack, just after the hurricane incident. The same Unitrends components that enabled DRaaS were used to recover business-critical data in less than an hour.
Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure
Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure is a purpose-built solution for Azure-native workloads and delivers multicloud business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) with no variable, per-incident charges such as those related to egress, backup verification, DR testing and DR. Hourly backups are replicated to the Unitrends Cloud, where your data is stored immutably in a private and secure Unitrends data center, where they are readily available for spin-up in the event of an Azure outage. Automated screenshot verification and monthly DR testing verify backups and ensure they are recovery-ready. Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure offers single-pane-of-glass management and easy deployment delivered for a flat fee.
As a turnkey solution, Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure enables you to perform DR outside Azure. With its enterprise-grade protection and rapid recovery, you can successfully fend off downtime, cyberattacks and outages against your mission-critical Azure workloads.
With Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure, you get superior data protection at a predictable cost.
Reimagine your cloud backup with Unitrends
Unitrends Cloud Services offer deep expertise gained through more than 30 years of delivering industry-leading backup and disaster recovery solutions. Remove the guesswork of public clouds with solutions purpose-built for BCDR. Unitrends Cloud Services strive to simplify backup, DR and business continuity.
Find out how our Unified Backup platform delivers an immutable cloud for long-term retention and DR and can help you reimagine your cloud backup strategy. Schedule a demo today.