Data protection is not a new concept today. Whether it’s in a personal, home, non-profit or corporate environment, you will always have data that you don’t want to lose – especially in the enterprise. No matter how small your company is, it will have more devices, larger volumes of data, and less tolerance for data loss than a personal use environment.
If you don’t want to experience serious losses from business interruptions (due to various human or non-human causes), an applicable enterprise backup solution is essential.
The challenges of enterprise backup for startups
Due to the nature of the enterprise environment, its backup solutions also have a significant feature compared to other personal or home use products – more advanced features along with the high price tag. For medium to large enterprises with strong capital and specialized technical staff, picking a backup product may not be a difficult task – just consider the company’s needs and make your choice within your budget. But what about for a startup or non-profit organization with limited funds?
As you may know, computer operating systems often come with some backup solutions, such as File History for Windows, but such tools have many limitations in terms of functionality, and many users therefore turn to free (or affordable) backup software on the market, which can basically meet their simple automated backup needs. But if your company is already involved in virtualization and has a dozen virtual machines loaded with important data or business, you may find that there are far fewer options available.
We know that virtual machines are managed by hypervisors, and a hypervisor can create and manage multiple VMs, which allows computing resources to be more fully utilized and facilitates cost savings for the organization.
However, hypervisors usually do not have a true bulk backup option for long-term storage.What we know as a snapshot (or checkpoint for Hyper-V) is just a rollback point before risky operations. Even VMware officially doesn’t recommend keeping it for too long. So, for business users who are really concerned about data security, it is always necessary to employ an effective VM backup solution.
Pick an affordable yet efficient enterprise backup solutionfor virtual machines
If your virtual environment is not very complex and all you need is a reliable and flexible data protection solution, you probably don’t need that many high-priced advanced features. For startups, the indispensable factors might be the following：
Ease of use: Technical knowledge and specialized terms that are common for professionals may cause higher learning costs for normal users.If you don’t want to invest a lot of time and effort into pre-study, it is better to choose a product that is easy to understand and operate.
Centralized console: It is inefficient and error-prone to rely on each employee to handle their own data backups individually. Instead,a centralized console operated by a single administrator can better manage enterprise backups with less human errors.
Automation: If you own more than one or two devices, you won’t want to manually perform backups every day. It’s best to create multiple schedules for different types of data to be backed up automatically. If you are worried about the backup files taking up too much space, you can also choose an enterprise backup solution that allows you to create a retention policy forautomatic backups deletion.
Besides, the ability to create automatic incremental/differential backup is also important. Compared to full backup, incremental/differential backups will only capture the changed data, and therefore take up less space & backup time.
Scalability: Any business or organization must consider the possibility of scaling up. A flexible backup solution allows for rapid expansion to accommodate more devices and data when needed,and dynamically adapt to the development of the enterprise.
Here I will present a backup product that meets the above conditions as an example.
Review: enterprise backup software for VMware & Hyper-V
AOMEI Cyber Backupis an enterprise backup software developed by AOMEI. You may have heard about its previous flagship products such as AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant. And just like these older products, AOMEI Cyber Backup offers robust backup capabilities while maintaining their usual simplicity and usability.
It canbackup VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines from a central console, saving you much time and administrative cost.After logging into a simple web console, just add VMware or Hyper-V devices to back up and restore virtual machine. Here are some points I like about it.
Simplicity
AOMEI Cyber Backup offers a centralized web console with intuitive user interface to achieve any operation with simple clicks.Even novices can set up the first backup task in minutes.
Automatic backup and retention
Set up schedules to automate virtual machinebackup. For VMs running critical business, it’s not recommended to perform backup during working hours. Instead, you can create schedules to run the backup at night or at weekends.
In consideration of storage space, you can also create a retention policy to keep backups upto date and remove old backup versions automatically.
Restore VM to new location
AOMEI Cyber Backup supports both in-place recovery and out-of-space recovery. Feel free to restore a VM entirely from any backup point, whether full or incremental/differential.
By “Restore to new location” option, you can also restore a VM to another datastore, host or vCenter for VM migration. It will create an identical VM directly from the backup in the specified location.
Backup scalability
AOMEI Cyber Backup offers a perpetual free editionwith a limit on the number of devices. If your business grows rapidly, you canupgradethe software to protectmore devices. It provides bothyearlysubscription and perpetual plans, supporting VMs/hosts from customized numbers to unlimited, and the prices areconsiderably affordable.
Overall, AOMEI Cyber Backup is a cost-effective choice for startups and small organizations. It provides practical virtual machine backup & restore functionswith the easiest operation.
