Phoenix Offers Cloud To Cloud Salesforce Backup

UK hosting provider Phoenix is adding the ability to back-up Salesforce data to its cloud backup service, at this week’s Cloud Expo Europe  in London.

Phoenix says its Cloud to Cloud Backup is the first commercially-available, packaged backup service which takes on-site data as well as user data from Salesforce, and copies it to a private cloud.  What it does is to use an API provided by Salesforce, to harvest the data a customer has in Salesforce, wrap it up and place it in Phoenix’s private service for safe keeping, alongside any other on-site data the customer chooses to back up there.

Users can rise from a cloud of ashes

“Our proposal uses the same software to backup on premise and cloud data,” said Mike Osborne managing director of Phoenix’s business continuity unit. “You set up all your backups from a single management tool, for off-site and on-premise data so you can have a common policy across all systems.”

There are several services, such as Backupify and CloudAlly, whch can back up a company’s Salesforce data to the cloud, however these are mostly specialist services, that only deal with Salesforce data, and would require IT staff to handle two separate back-up interfaces, said Osborne.

While Salesforce’s service has provided reliable, without major incidents of data loss, it’s still a good idea to back up cloud data, said Osborne, in case of incidents such as the loss of control of a Salesforce account. There have been instances where subscribers to cloud services have had all their data wiped by a rogue user or a hacker who gained access to their IT systems, he warned.

In these instances, it is possible that a provider like Salesforce may be able to give access to an earlier backup, but it can’t be guaranteed, as providers do not tend to include backups in their service agreements, said Osborne: “End users must understand that it is always their responsibility to back up their own data that is stored in the Cloud, from both compliance and a business perspectives.”

Phoenix has been offering disaster recovery services for 25 yeras (much of that under the ICM brand), and has been offering a cloud backup service for around five years (not marketed under the name “cloud” for much of that time), said Osborne: “We have two sites in the UK, that are replicating each other. We back up data from clients into our own internal private cloud.”

Compared with recovery from tape, a cloud backup service is speedy, he said.

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