How Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Prevents Cloud Lock-In

Barb Darrow writes today in GigaOm about fear of lock-in as a barrier to cloud adoption.

It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold – but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

While she may not realize it just yet, the solution to this problem is emerging via an unlikely industry – the backup industry.

In the on-premise backup world, which is where most of IT still lives, data backup was just data backup. But as data moves to the cloud, that dynamic changes. Why? Because in the cloud, you don’t always have complete control of your data the way that you do in on-premise application deployments. Replicated data from a cloud-to-cloud backup product like Backupify isn’t just a backup – it’s a secure second copy of your data that is under your control, and that has more advantages than just data recovery.

Take an example and consider a company moving to Google Apps. All that application data is now stored in the cloud and, while Google has very friendly policies around data ownership, many IT administrators don’t feel like they have complete control. Now, assume you have Backupify’s Google Apps backup installed. You now have a secure second copy of your data that is in a separate location, under your control. You can’t be locked-in to Google when you have another copy of your data that is independent of Google Apps.

When we announced our Backupify developer API earlier this year, we weren’t just responding to the need for backup. We were responding to the need for data control. As we start rolling out integrations with dozens of SaaS applications, there will soon come a day when, for every SaaS application you have, you can sleep well knowing you have a secure second copy of that data under your control at Backupify. When you control all of your data, you can move to the cloud with confidence.

The cloud offers many benefits, but they come with a set of costs as well. The data silos that result are difficult to tie together, and the data isn’t always under your control. Backupify has a roadmap to help solve those problems. Cloud-to-cloud backup is really so much more than just backup – it is just a stepping stone to a vision of complete ownership and control of your cloud data.