Why Your CIO Cares About Cloud-to-Cloud Backup

The cloud is safe, but not infallible.

Perhaps nobody knows this more than the CIO. After all, as the CIO you’ve been been at the forefront of the cloud and watched the growth of SaaS applications within your company. You know that backing up data – whether stored on-premise or in the cloud is always a must and you’re responsible for keeping data safe and secure. The job entails deploying security and disaster recovery solutions and policies, which in the case of cloud services depend greatly on cloud to cloud backup (like Backupify).

So, why do today’s CIOs care about backing up cloud applications?

Every browser is now a (vulnerable) workstation

The beauty of the cloud is that most of its applications are accessible by any modern web browser, meaning employees can do work anywhere, anytime from almost any device. The terrifying danger of the cloud (at least for CIOs and security officers) is that any browser can potentially access your cloud applications—including the buggy, spyware-riddled browsers on your employees’ personal computers, tablets and smartphones.

Be honest: as a CIO you had a hard enough time keeping the browsers on corporate workstations locked down and free of security threats. You can’t reasonably expect that moving to the cloud will make it harder for your employees to have their passwords stolen and their data corrupted.

Once your employees work in the cloud, you’ll need a backup and recovery solution that can undo the damage of their browser-based shenanigans as quickly as possible. That requires cloud to cloud backup

Social engineering just got (terrifyingly) easy

Just as cloud CIOs like you must now treat every browser as a vulnerable workstation, you must also treat every Wi-Fi network as a vulnerable workplace. That means the sneaky social engineers that used to have to pose as delivery or repair personnel to gain access to your employees can now simply accost them at a coffee shop, airport lounge or trade show panel.

If your users can do damage to your cloud data accidentally, imagine what a social engineer armed with your user’s access credentials could do intentionally.

Disaster recovery no longer includes physical control of servers

If a natural disaster befalls your old-fashioned co-located data center, you always have the last resort option of physically visiting the facility and accessing your server racks to get at your data. That worst case option doesn’t exist in the cloud. And while it may be entirely unprecedented for Google or another SaaS application to permanently lose your data, do you want to be the CIO that has to tell your CEO that your data is permanently lost because you just assumed Google (or Box or Salesforce) was good for it?

Having backups of your cloud data means that, even in the worst of all possible cloud failures, you still can get at a copy of your data. That’s more than just good policy; that’s job security—and it requires cloud to cloud backup.

Need to convince other executives of the benefits of cloud to cloud backup? Download the eBook, Making the Executive Case for Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, below to learn more.