Best Data Storage and Backup Solutions Perfect for Small Businesses

Introduction

The global storage and backup software market are expected to reach $17.25 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 9.7%. Major players in the sector include Dell Inc., HPE, Netapp, Hitachi, and IBM. Currently, the market is experiencing an immense growth surge as companies restructure and rearrange their operations as they recoup from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are trying to phase out physical servers even as they double down on virtualized infrastructure and cloud-first strategies. Most organizations are embracing a cloud-first approach with estimates suggesting that nearly half of the production workloads could be hosted on the cloud by 2023. For more information on cloud backup solutions, please refer to Backup Solutions Houston.

In fact, economic uncertainty and data protection challenges have both impeded the progress of companies enacting major Digital Transformation (DX) initiatives recently. According to the Veeam Data Protection Report 2021, 58 percent of backups actually fail to happen and as much as 40 percent of CXOs cite economic uncertainty as one of the biggest contributors to their organization’s DX initiatives. In a similar vein, backup approaches are also shifting from on-premise to cloud-based solutions with recent estimates suggesting that the latter could go up to as much as 46 percent of the total workload by 2023. Most of these are likely to be in partnerships with Backup-as-a-Service providers such as Data Storage Solutions, while another 51 percent of organizations plan to make use of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service. In fact, with 77 percent of businesses the world over likely going ahead with cloud-first backup by 2023, we are likely to witness much-improved reliability of backups, shifting of cost management, and most importantly, a huge burden removed from IT resources and reassigned to focus on faster and better DX projects that allow companies to competently compete in the digital economy.

What is Data Storage?

Data storage refers to the digital storage of all necessary enterprise files and documents. Storage systems differ in nature and can include electromagnetic, optical, or other media. This storage can act as backups in case there is a need to preserve and restore the data such as in the case of a server or a system crash, a data leak, or a breach. Data storage can be done on physical hard drives, disk drives, USB drives, or stored in the cloud in the form of virtual data. Important considerations in data storage include reliability, security features, and cost considerations. Given the wide variety of data storage solutions in applications available, you should browse through different options before arriving at the best fit for your business. For comprehensive guidance on this, please refer to Disaster Recovery Houston.

4 Best Backup Solutions for Small Businesses

Acronis
This hybrid cloud solution provides a wide variety of options including simple file backups, application-based backups, and more. The solution also provides detailed reports on failures and successes that enable companies to quickly detect and resolve issues. The solution is known to provide good tech support and a solid and reliable backup experience for small and medium businesses. Their services can effectively safeguard your critical systems, and also help create image backups for moving individual systems to new hardware. They can also provide you with virtual hard disks to be used with VMware or Hyper-V.

Rubrik
Rubrik makes use of the Cloud Data Management platform, and its offerings go much beyond the regular backup and restore functions. Rubrik enables organizations with a complete toolkit for comprehensive management of enterprise data by mobilizing applications, analyzing data, providing ransomware recovery, and guaranteeing instant application availability. Rubrik’s additional use cases have found much love with users thanks to its high-speed VM restores, and much more. It also offers integration with vCenter and Powershell via the Rubrik API. With Rubrik, you can finally guarantee ‘no service disruption’ even during major disasters and emergencies as recovery takes mere seconds.

Veeam
Veeam is known for its reliability and transparency with rare failures. Veeam can be leveraged to backup literally hundreds of virtual machines and physical devices. The supported media could be stored on a local NAS or stored digitally on Veeam Cloud Connect. Veeam offers a greater degree of customization with a variety of backup settings, copies, and replication, so you can best choose the settings that are most suited to your enterprise requirements.

Cohesity
Cohesity is a hyper-convergence backup solution and also provides economical storage for cold data. It offers easy integration with other systems including AWS, Pure Storage, or VMware, and also offers a wide range of APIs directly. It works exceedingly well and fast for indexing and restoring data, and virtual machine backups. Data compression and deduplication are also easy with Cohesity. A nifty little feature is the different levels of restoration that users can use to make partial recoveries if needed. Cohesity also offers comprehensive disaster recovery with detailed planning and replication options and is a highly favored solution for users trying to replace legacy backup solutions.