Why the CEO Cares About Cloud-to-Cloud Backup

In one sense, the Chief Executive Officer cares about cloud to cloud backup for all the reasons the rest of C-suite cares about cloud to cloud backup: because the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything. Still, there are explicit reasons why a CEO would care about cloud to cloud backup—because the job is to manage the bigger picture.

Lower the downside risk of adopting the cloud

Every major change to the organization entails risk, and the CEO must examine that risk by weighing the upside and downside of the particular tactic or strategy. CEOs are rewarded handsomely for achieving upside, and are often dismissed for experiencing too many downside events.

Adopting the cloud for any mission-critical application is hardly an unusual move these days, but “everyone else is doing” is rarely an acceptable excuse when a CEO oversees a poorly implemented cloud adoption or migration. Cloud to cloud backup removes nearly all the risk associated with adopting a cloud application, because it ensures that even if employees actively or passively corrupt cloud data, it will be recoverable. Cloud to cloud backup shrinks the downside risk profile of any cloud adoption.

In the midst of cloud migration, cloud to cloud backup is the prudent CEO’s best friend.

Avoid cloud vendor lock-in

There’s a short term downside if the CEO oversees a failed cloud adoption, but there’s perhaps an even more significant upside risk if the cloud migration succeeds: vendor lock-in. While most cloud vendors have pretty explicit conditions on data ownership within their Terms of Service and Service Level Agreements, that’s cold comfort if the vendor doesn’t honor those terms.

What do you do if your cloud vendor suffers its own financial or technical setback and cannot meet its obligations to provide you access to your data? What if your cloud vendor is acquired and the new owners alter your Terms of Service (because most cloud ToS documents allow cloud vendors to unilaterally alter terms at any time)? What if your cloud vendor simply becomes an overwhelmingly dominant player in your industry and raises the price for their cloud solution beyond acceptable costs for your company?

Could you take your data—and your meta-data—out of your cloud solution and move it elsewhere in a timely fashion?

If your on-premise solution provider pulled any of these stunts, you still had physical possession of the hardware where your data and applications were stored. You had the power, and you could take your business elsewhere if need be. Cloud to cloud backup preserves this option with cloud applications. If a cloud vendor attempts to strong arm the company—to effectively hold company data hostage in their servers—cloud to cloud backup provides anywhere, anytime access to a second copy of your business data.

The CEO, is in a much stronger bargaining position if a cloud vendor gets ruthless. Never bring a knife to a gunfight, and never bargain with your cloud vendor without having a cloud to cloud backup already in place.

Learn more about why the C-suite needs (and should have) cloud to cloud backup in the eBook below: