As data continues to grow in volume and strategic value, businesses are increasingly turning to the cloud to meet data storage and management needs. The reasons by now are well-known: cloud services can provide unprecedented levels of flexibility and scalability, while also saving on hardware and other costs related to on-premises solutions.

But backing up and storing data in the cloud presents its own challenges, particularly to companies lacking large IT departments. Data is typically a company’s greatest asset, and thus requires protection from disasters, loss or theft. In the digital, real-time economy, data also must be easily accessible – to approved personnel – for employees to be productive and better serve customers as part of today’s highly digital global business landscape.

Providing adequate backup and data protection, while also enabling easy and fast access to that data in a controlled way, can be difficult, even if a company’s data stored in only one location – an increasingly rare situation. Today, businesses of all sizes are invariably ‘hybrid’, storing data in multiple locations both on site and off – the internal datacentre, physical and virtual servers, off-site storage, cloud storage (often with multiple vendors), networked computers, mobile devices, mobile applications and employee cloud accounts, such as Dropbox. Businesses are also increasingly processing a wide range of workloads across mixed environments, including physical and virtual, applications, and mobile devices.

As an IT professional, your job has never been more challenging, with more data in more locations coupled with the need to keep track of it all and make sure that it’s protected at all times.

Complications in the cloud

If you’re running networks for small businesses and mid-sized companies, trying to manage and secure data in multiple locations, using multiple point solutions can quickly become a frustrating and time-consuming nightmare.

Point solutions tend to work on a particular workload or type of workload. They may back up just physical servers or just virtual servers, but most companies have a mix of the two types. They have physical servers, they have virtual servers, they may have several different types of virtual servers – one cloud service provider might be using Microsoft Hyper-V, another Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or Citrix XenServer.

Without a single, easy-to-use platform offering, greater control and unified management, IT will struggle to meet business requirements for basic data protection. In the event of a fire, flood, prolonged network outage, or major security breach, inadequate data backup and protection can doom a business with no ability to recover or to quickly get its IT systems back up and running.

Using only cloud storage can complicate data access, protection and backup, because data is being stored in a remote location managed by a third party and connected by a network. Should the network be disrupted, data will be inaccessible unless it has been backed up on-premise, either in a data centre or some other local storage, such as an appliance or employee workstation.

Furthermore, a company using only cloud storage relies to a large extent on a third party to physically protect its data. Service-level agreements may specify promised levels of data protection and cloud uptime, but these are hardly guarantees.

Protecting data in a hybrid cloud environment

To ensure complete data protection for data stored in multiple places locally and remotely, companies need a hybrid cloud data solution that can copy data to and from various cloud deployments, as well as in local and remote locations, PCs and virtual servers. By backing up data automatically in multiple locations, companies can safeguard their valuable business data while providing secure access to employees, partners, customers and applications.

A complete data protection platform should provide your business with protection against every type of data-loss threat, whether it’s local backup for a PDF or spreadsheet accidentally deleted by an employee, a lost connection to the internet services provider hosting or managing your website, or cloud recovery of an entire database following a flood at a company’s main offices.

Safety, security, and privacy

Backing up data to protect against accidents, user negligence and natural disasters is essential in today’s highly digital and mobile marketplace. So too is providing data safety, security and privacy as it travels from a customer’s mobile app to a cloud server to a virtual server in the company’s data centre, and all the way back up the chain.

A highly connected, digital world has many benefits, but it also attracts a lot of bad actors trying to steal information. Data security in a hybrid environment, therefore, must include encryption technology to keep that data from prying eyes.

Effective data protection also means guarding the identities of people (such as customers or employees) associated with your company’s data. This can be done by storing ownership information separately from the relevant data, preventing a hacker from linking banking or financial information to a name. In many cases, data protection also involves ensuring the company is meeting privacy and compliance standards. In particular, this is a major issue for healthcare companies required to meet national patient data privacy requirements.

Growing amounts of information and mobile devices, along with an increasingly mobile workforce are driving the hybrid trend, and businesses need to make sure they find the best possible solution to secure their increasingly disparate data, whatever sector they operate in.

Daniel Model is manager of sales engineering Europe at Acronis, a provider of hybrid cloud data protection solutions for businesses