How to Choose the Best Enterprise Backup Software in 2024? Best Enterprise Backup Solutions and Tools.

What is an enterprise backup solution?

An enterprise-grade backup solution consists not only of backup software itself, but also likely includes immutable storage of various types and network connections with high-rate bandwidth. In addition, your internal knowledgebase, training for new employees as well as the vendor’s documentation are all vital elements of your backup system.

Enterprise backup software tools have become indispensable components of modern business operations as more and more organizations increasingly depend on their IT infrastructure. These solutions now play a pivotal role in transforming organizations by safeguarding data from loss, corruption, human error and theft.

The leading enterprise backup software solutions not only support specific technical features, but also help to:

Reduce backup and recovery costs

The recovery costs, in case the data sits in the cloud, can be significant. Cloud storage providers tend to charge less for uploading data, whereas they charge much more in case when the data is downloaded for recovery reasons. Good backup software should minimize the download volume in this particular case, not to mention  the minimization of disk and tape storage costs.

Simplify backup administration

Enterprise IT infrastructures with tens of thousands of endpoints (computers, servers, VMs and others) may be complex to manage. Backup can be a nightmare for an admin who has to think about where to backup the specific endpoint, if there is enough storage available, network bandwidth, what the retention policies are for this data and where the older copies need to be migrated from to free up space. If your backup solution supports helpful efficiency tools such as automated copy or migration of backed up data, automated restart of backup jobs after cancellation, job scheduling and sequencing with priorities – it can help system administrators sleep better at night.

Minimize staff training and ongoing support

Similarly to the previous point, enterprise companies usually have large numbers of IT staff and teaching new employees on how to use the backup system can be extremely time-consuming. Leveraging intuitive UI and automation features can significantly reduce the need for extensive staff training and ongoing support, making the management of enterprise backup solutions more efficient and cost-effective.

Enhance regulatory compliance

The system of backup needs to adjust with the organization’s regulation mandate. Depending on the nature of the enterprise, compliance regulations might be generic like GDPR or industry-specific like HIPAA, ITAR or CMMC 2.0. Also local regulations can apply here as well, examples can include Australia’s Essential Eight, UK’s Government Security Classifications and more. Enterprise companies operating worldwide must navigate into a complex landscape of compliance regulations all over the world.

What is NOT an enterprise backup solution?

Solutions that try to appear – or even be – enterprise-grade may in fact not be of true  enterprise level, and this creates an additional risk for a customer looking to replace an existing solution or establish a brand new backup infrastructure. Below is, what I think might not be an option for those with true enterprise-grade requirements:

• When data is being backed up to a public consumer cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, this is unlikely to be being used in an enterprise level scenario. These tools have synchronization features, but lack significant security, disaster recovery and performance qualities for enterprise datasets. Instead, the solution would be better to integrate with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and other private clouds through S3 interface.
• Consumer-grade backup solutions and solutions which were targeted towards the consumer market in the past, when they were initially released. Certainly, most backup companies try to target both consumer and enterprise markets and evolve their technology accordingly, but a solution which was designed for personal use from the early beginning is very hard to modify for enterprise needs. Scalability and flexibility, which are needed in huge heterogeneous IT environments, can rarely be adequately achieved in such cases.
• Solutions which lack offsite storage backup options, including tape media can’t be considered as enterprise-ready. Relying solely on server disks, NAS or SAN is not longer enough – there needs to be an offsite air gapped location like tape or special cloud data center, which will deliver redundancy and DR to your system.
• Open source backup tools without enterprise support. There are some open source enterprise-grade backup tools available, and they have a decent amount of technical features to satisfy demanding IT environments. However, the problem of open source backup can be a lack of professional support and reliability through SLAs which increases risks to lose data and not be able to restore it. One notable exception is Bacula, which is open source-based, but which provides full SLA’s to the highest levels for even the largest organizations.

A good enterprise backup solution should be able to offer features such as:

• Extensive data protection capabilities. Features such as backup immutability, backup data encryption, 3-2-1 rule support and granular access control lists are essential when it comes to protecting information against any kind of tampering. Enterprises across the world are the constant target for ransomware attacks of all kinds, so the protection of the backed up data should be the strongest possible.
• Support for multiple backup policies and different backup levels. Different backup variations are suitable for specific use cases and situations. Full backups are slow but include all of the folders and files within the backed up environment. Differential backups only copy files modified since the last full backup. Incremental backups only cover data modified since the previous backup, no matter the type. Enterprise-ready solutions frequently face large datasets, which is why the best of them provide the opportunity to create synthetic full – the new full backup which is made of all incrementals since the last full. Synthetic backups help to save storage space, network bandwidth and budgets.
• Disaster recovery & business continuity. Minimal downtime and ensured business continuity are critical parameters for enterprises, so backup solutions for enterprises have to be able to offer automated failover for business-critical systems and support high availability infrastructures. Data replication to offsite storage like tape is also necessary for resilience. A very important aspect of a successful DR is bare metal backup and recovery, which needs to be supported for both Windows and Linux environments.
• Support for various storage media types. The majority of enterprises run sophisticated systems that consist of multiple storage types with complex infrastructure. Being able to support different storage media types, be it on-premise servers, virtual machine disks, enterprise cloud storage (both public and private), and magnetic tape is a must-have for an enterprise backup solution. With the rise of 3-2-1 rule, air gapping and other security measures, it goes against best practices for an enterprise-grade backup to support only disk, and for example, not being able to backup to tape.
• Flexible data retention options. The capability to implement long-term and short-term data retention policies is a significant advantage in this market since enterprises and large corporations have to adhere to various regulatory requirements (including the necessary data storage time period) regarding the  different types of data they own. A good backup solution should be able to offer flexible retention controls, support custom deletion protocols and automated pruning jobs.

The list above is far from conclusive, the topic of necessary enterprise-grade backup features is explored later in the article.

2024 objectives and challenges of enterprise backup solutions

In 2024 the importance of data security is at an all-time high, with geopolitical conflicts being backed by cyberattacks on a regular basis. Ongoing hacking campaigns for example, gain more momentum as time goes on, and the number of cyber attacks continues to grow in strength and complexity.

In this context, no security feature can be considered excessive, and some of the most sophisticated options become far more common and widely used than ever. For example, air gapping as a concept works well against most forms of ransomware due to the ability to physically disconnect one or several backups from the outside world.

A very similar logic applies to backup immutability – the ability to create data that cannot be modified in any way once it has been written the first time. WORM (write-once-read-many) storage works great with providing backup immutability, and plenty of enterprise backup solutions can also offer such capabilities in one way or another.

Here are some of the most recent issues that enterprise-grade backup software has to work with:

• Shrinking backup windows are becoming the norm, necessitating backup solutions that deliver exceptional performance without compromising application and system availability. The size of data (even the incremental parts of backups, not even talking about fulls) will be growing even more in 2024, and what was possible to backup during the night non-business hours in the past, is no longer working even during 24 hours time frame. Thus, enterprises with big data need backup systems which can work granularly with selected parts of your infrastructure, compress and deduplicate data to lower the bandwidth and ensure low I/O load to support the apps performance stability.
• Evolving regulatory landscapes demand stricter compliance, placing additional burdens on enterprise backup solutions and the way they process data. More and more vendors will be looking to comply with regulations and standards released recently in 2023 and in the future 2024, including global ones like FIPS, NIST, CMMC 2.0, ITAR, NATO Stanag and local ones like Government Security Classifications in the UK, Australia’s Essential Eight, and many more. Enterprise backup solutions should comply with these and future regulations. To do this, not only securing data against cyber threats becomes important but also managing data security procedures to comply with the increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape.
• During the growing complexity of data protection, IT organizations face increasing pressure to control costs, streamline operations, and maximize resource utilization. Enterprise organizations need to optimize backup budgets in 2024 and hence choose backup software licensing which does not charge by data volume. In addition to backup software itself, it is important to minimize storage costs, specifically data transmitted to and from the cloud, which minimizes your cloud costs. Deduplication on the client and storage side needs to be in the list of priority features in this case. Tiered storage might also be a benefit – less critical datasets can be stored on cheaper and slower storage, while important ones can reside on more expensive media with better RTO and RPO.
• Data is no longer confined to traditional on-premises infrastructure. The rise of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments has introduced new complexities in data protection. Organizations need solutions that can seamlessly safeguard data across diverse cloud environments. Cloud-agnostic backup solutions allow for better flexibility, and in 2024 you have to choose ones with encryption at rest and in motion in order to secure your backed up data.
• Similarly, enterprise organizations tend to adopt diverse microservice and container technologies and build their infrastructures using them, so in 2024 it will be increasingly vital to choose backup solutions that support backing up Kubernetes, OpenShift, Tanzu, Docker and others.
• The proliferation of data-driven technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), HPC, big data, video applications, and data-intensive applications, has resulted in an exponential surge in data volume. Organizations will be grappling with the sheer scale of data they need to deduplicate, backup and restore in 2024. The rise of machine learning and AI algorithms will help in better data deduplication, identifying critical data to backup and ensuring optimal backup windows.

Why is business size important when it comes to choosing a backup solution?

Data backup challenges are unique to each business size. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are more likely to encounter sudden influxes of data that exceeds their current management capabilities. While SMBs may not utilize multiple data storage mediums, the sheer volume of data they collect can still pose significant challenges. SMBs should prioritize cloud backup solutions that offer exceptional scalability, especially if they are experiencing rapid growth. Also, cloud backup solutions for SMBs should be easier to manage because they don’t require a lot of IT support and are much easier to deploy.

On the other hand, large and geographically dispersed teams often face challenges with managing incredibly large amounts of data that may be stored in multiple locations, causing plenty of inconveniences when it comes to retrieving all this data in a structured manner. Larger organizations also tend to find out that significant parts of their data are stored separately from the rest of the information in the infrastructure, creating a massive number of issues for business continuity and data recoverability. The reliance of large enterprises on a diverse range of applications, DBs, virtualization and container technologies in the IT environment makes data backups particularly complex. Storage types can also include multiple cloud locations, tape, NAS devices and disks. Large enterprises should prioritize enterprise backup solutions that can effectively manage data in hybrid and complex IT environments.

Choosing the correct enterprise-grade backup software solution

If we assume that a typical enterprise company organizes and processes an ongoing and increasing volume of information (petabytes of data) in a big data center with thousands of servers, the below criteria list should be taken into account when defining best solutions for enterprise backup.

Since the average level of requirements for an enterprise-grade backup solution is high, it would be easier to split these characteristics into multiple thematic groups for better reading comprehension. In this list we are going to review 3 categories: Performance, Versatility, and Accessibility.

Performance

An enterprise backup software solution should:

• Be reliable and guarantee the execution of backup and recovery operations in an integral and consistent manner, without loss or omission of data. Fault tolerance should be ensured by data integrity checks, corruption detection, verification of backups and granular file-level recovery.
• Provide the options to maintain several concurrent instances of backup and recovery. These elements should have the ability to be automated so that the process is carried out efficiently and with minimum execution time, without affecting the consistency of data.
• Provide tools that optimize the data volume transmission during the backups in order to save storage capacity and network bandwidth at an enterprise-grade scale. This is done using both hardware and software capabilities: snapshots, 2-side deduplication, comm line compression and other methods.
• Provide strongest encryption of the backed up data (AES 128, AES192, AES256 or blowfish as well as EFS for Windows) in order to guarantee its privacy and guarantee TSL (SSL) communication between backup system components. Storage daemons also need to be encrypted.
• Support HPC, complex and big data IT infrastructures which deal with petabytes of data and millions of files and ensure sufficient performance in HPC environments (Hadoop, SAP HANA, Oracle, IBM HPSS and others).

Versatility

• Have the capability to adapt to heterogeneous environments, since in many enterprise-level organizations it is common to use software and hardware of different types, characteristics and manufacturers, including servers, NAS devices, tape drives, operating systems, virtualization systems, applications, and databases.
• Provide the ability to grow and adapt in accordance with the rising data volumes and data retention requirements. This growth should not be impeded by a backup solution which becomes too expensive as it scales up, and by a storage media.cost growth.
• Facilitate the implementation of enterprise-specific backup tasks necessary to perform effective data backup strategies. These can include: condition- and event-based backup stopping and starting services, creating and deleting files, replication and migration of data, validating the execution of a backup job, generating alerts when job is not completed successfully, backup scheduling and others.
• Allow the configuration of different levels of backup that conform to an organization’s backup policies in an efficient way, in terms of proper RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Enterprise-grade organizations typically require full, incremental, differential and virtual full (synthetic) backup levels.
• Support a wide range of virtualization systems incl. VMware, Hyper V, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, Azure VM, KVM, Nutanix and Proxmox. Many of these hypervisors can be used in a single enterprise-level organization in a single data center. It’s important to be able to backup not only the full VM images, but also to be able to restore single files from them as it can affect restore speed on enterprise levels.
• Support a substantial range of databases incl. MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SAP HANA and Sybase. With enterprise-grade DBMS systems it’s important to ensure the ability to backup databases incrementally and have the PITR (point-in-time recovery) features.
• Offer tools to manage backed up data in various cases such as:
  • Applying IT legal compliance regulations;
  • Applying compliance with quality standards, such as ISO;
  • Applying compliance with methodologies such as ITIL.
• Support data backup in hybrid cloud environments, since it allows the implementation of a high availability environment with adequate levels of redundancy. Cloud storage can be used as a media itself, and also needs to be backed up as an endpoint. Cloud connectivity needs to include Amazon S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Glacier at a minimum.
• Be FIPS 140-2 compliant and provide advanced security controls incl. CRAM-MD5 authentication between components, various immutability features, SIEM integration, silent data corruption detection and automated malware detection.
• Support container-based infrastructures that use Docker, OpenShift or Kubernetes and be able to backup Docker volumes and Kubernetes clusters These technologies are the most likely ones used to build enterprise-grade container environments.
• Be able to perform bare metal recovery for both Windows and Linux as a part of organization’s disaster recovery strategy

Accessibility

• Integrate with enterprise monitoring systems and send notifications of backup operation processes. Additionally notifications can be set up through emails, push notifications on mobile devices, web browsers, etc.
• Allow interrelation with enterprise BI tools that can provide backups’ statistics, and in this way generate reports and dashboards that can be used in companies for diverse activities such as storage capacity planning, bandwidth state, system functional indicators, and more.
• Allow backup and recovery administration to be multi-channel, but complete. To do this, it must have utilities or tools as part of the application that are cross-platform, easy to use, offer functionality to users with various expertise levels in configuration, administration and monitoring of backups.
• Allow the organization to manage the storage resources where the backed up data is stored. In enterprise-level companies this may include disks, tape drives, auto-changers, cloud storage devices, NAS or SAN devices or online storage applications.
• Allow integration with mobile devices, phones or tablets, including not only notifications but also administration and monitoring capabilities.

All these characteristics contribute to protecting the enterprise-grade IT infrastructure of a company, including operating systems, server, user data and applications, to avoid potentially catastrophic data losses that may affect a company’s business continuity. Knowing what to look for makes it a lot easier to figure out what solution is the best possible option for your specific company.

Enterprise cloud backups

One more important topic needs to be discussed before we move on to the list of backup software examples. The topic in question revolves around cloud backups – a relatively common element of enterprise-grade backup solutions that offers cloud storage as one of several storage locations for enterprise backups.

It is not uncommon for large-scale enterprise backup software to offer cloud storage capabilities in some way. As such, there is a list of factors that potential clients have to keep in mind when it comes to enterprise backup software with cloud capabilities:

• Understanding your expectations from a cloud backup is a good way to begin, since a lot of enterprise-grade companies have to find software that meets their specific RPO or RTO requirements. That way, the company can also clearly understand which of these two parameters is preferable while learning what features are likely to be critical to them in this context.
• Performing bandwidth capability assessment is another good starting point, since cloud storage transfers the entirety of a company’s information using network connection. Making sure that a cloud service’s backup constraints would not affect the company’s regular operations is a necessity for enterprises. Some specific cloud backup storage features exist for the purpose of reducing the potential network load, such as the support for continuous incremental backups.
• Evaluating the capabilities of customer support is entirely logical in the context of long-term relationships with which most enterprise cloud storage solutions work. Every single issue with cloud storage that cannot be solved in a timely manner can be a significant detriment to an enterprise’s data recovery process – and potentially to its business, and competent customer support directly contributes to solving these issues in most cases.
• Learning about the reporting and alerting capabilities of the cloud storage solution is another necessary step in the process of evaluating these systems. One of the biggest goals of these systems is to keep track of a company’s data stored in cloud storage. Receiving regular updates on the current data state from a cloud storage provider is a great way to make the overall workload of administrators a little easier.

Enterprise-grade cloud storage can be a great addition to practically any existing backup system or infrastructure, especially in the context of a well-known “3-2-1 rule”. This rule implies three different backup copies stored using at least two different device types and with at least one copy being stored in a geographically different location from the rest. The last part of this explanation can be a good fit for cloud storage.

The remote location in this case can be a physical storage that is geographically different from your current location – or cloud storage that does not have a dedicated storage location.

How to choose an enterprise backup solution?

Picking a single backup solution from a long list of competitors can be extremely hard due to the many factors the potential customer must consider. In order to make the process easier, we have made a checklist that any customer can rely on when attempting to choose a backup solution for their enterprise organization.

1. Figure out your backup strategy

A detailed backup strategy is practically required for large-scale businesses and enterprises, making it easier to plan ahead and figure out appropriate action for specific situations – user errors, system failures, cyberattacks, etc.

Some of the most common topics that should be addressed in a backup strategy are:

• High availability. Different companies have their own preferences when it comes to backup storage locations. One company might want to store backups in cloud storage, while another favors on-premise storage within its infrastructure. Determining the storage locations for future backups is an essential first step. In the context of 3-2-1 rule there needs to be several locations, both on- and offsite. Please note that Bacula Systems strongly recommends the 3-2-1 rule for all organizations as part of their best practices in backup and recovery.

Example high availability infrastructure for enterprise: 

2 backup servers: primary one in the main data center, while the second one in another data center or in the cloud. A combination of storage systems following 3-2-1 rule: on-premise NAS or SAN via RAID, cloud and tape for resiliency. Real-time block-level replication between both servers. Automated failover and load balancers for backup servers to minimize load. High-performance network switches and paths, fibre channel. All of the above with the monitoring system and automated alerts.

• Backup scheduling. Understanding what time frame would be best to perform a system backup is key to making sure that there are no interruptions or slow-downs caused by a sudden backup process. Plenty of backup solutions prefer to create full backups outside of business hours to avoid interruptions to businesses themselves. However, enterprises may have so much data that creating fulls takes even longer than night, and in such situations synthetic fulls may be a better option.

Example backup schedule for enterprise: 

Create full backup during weekends (for example, Sunday midnight) to minimize impact on applications’ performance. Perform incrementals at the end of each workday (for example, 11:30 PM Monday to Saturday). A single differential backup on Wednesday night. Of course, for systems with critical importance (high-transactional DBs, for example) execute more incremental backups, probably several times per day.

• Backup policies. Determining backup policies wisely allows storage space and network bandwidth. A full backup would be best performed every once in a while (week or month, depending on your situation), and an incremental backup would have to happen on a regular basis (daily, for example) to ensure data consistency. Differential backups are in between full and incrementals because they require more storage space than incrementals, but are faster to restore. Choosing the proper mix of backup policies depends on data size, data type, data change frequency, RTO & RPO and network and storage resources.

Example enterprise backup policy: 

Perform a full backup once a month during the weekend when the network usage is at a minimum. Add 2-4 differential backups during the month to track changes since the last full. On top of that – add daily incrementals to track day-to-day differences. Use all incrementals once a month to create synthetic full backup, in case new full backup is not possible.

• Backup targets. An average company may have multiple storage types as a part of its infrastructure. The main goal is determining the specific storage types for a backup solution while also keeping the potential backup size in mind (since backups tend to grow in size as time goes on, and knowing when it is time to expand the existing storage or purchase a new one is important). Implementing tiered storage is also a good tactic, when essential datasets are stored in an expensive storage with rapid recovery capabilities, while older or less critical datasets may be placed into slower cloud storages like Amazon Deep Archive or to tape media.
• Audit requirements. There can be plenty of industry-specific requirements and standards that the company has to adhere to when it comes to data storage. Having a complete understanding of what regulations your company has to adhere to is a great advantage when it comes to choosing a backup solution. For example, organizations will almost certainly have to comply with GDPR and CCPA, PCI DSS if you’re accepting online payments, HIPAA if you’re a medical organization, SOX if you’re publicly traded, CMMC if you’re working with US DoD, and others.
• RTOs and RPOs. These parameters are some of the most important for any backup strategy. As their names suggest, RTO represents the time frame that would have to pass before the company’s operational status is restored. Conversely, RPO shows how much data the company is willing to lose without significant damage to its regular operations. Understanding your needs in terms of RPO and RTO also makes it easier to figure out parameters such as recoverability, backup frequency, recovery feature set, and backup software SLAs.

Example RTO & RPO requirements for enterprise:

• Critical apps & high-transactional databases
  • 1-2 hours RTO, 10 minutes RPO
• Regular work apps (CRM, ERP, etc)
  •  4-6 hours RTO, RPO 1 hour
• Email, messenger and other communication apps
  • 2-4 hours RTO, 30 minutes RPO
• File shares
  • 24 hours RTO, 4 hours RPO
• Other non-critical and demo systems
  • RTO 24-72 hours, 12-24 hours RPO

The process of finalizing the backup strategy as a single document has to be a collaboration between multiple departments to ensure the strategy’s adherence to the company’s objectives and business goals. Creating a concrete backup strategy is an excellent first step toward understanding what your company needs from an enterprise backup solution.

2. Research backup solutions for enterprises

This entire step revolves around collecting information about backup solutions. A significant part of this step has already been done in this exact article, with our long and detailed list of enterprise backup software tools. Of course, the analysis can go much deeper by calculating business-critical parameters and comparing different features based on the results of specific tests.

3. Calculate TCO

Enterprise backup solutions are considered long-term investments, and performing a cost-benefit analysis and calculation TCO makes it much easier to evaluate the software. Here is what needs to be taken into account during calculations:

• Cost of license (perpetual or subscription-based model);
• Cost of hardware;
• Implementation fees (in case you plan to use outsourced integration);
• Cost of ongoing support and updates;
• Cost of power, cooling and other utilities to run the backup system;
• Cost of additional bandwidth and network;
• Cost of storage (disks, tape, cloud, as well as storage management software costs);
• Cost of training personnel.

4. Perform “Proof-of-Concept” (PoC) tests

When you have identified a relatively small list of potential backup solutions, it is time to move on to the testing phase to ensure that the solution meets all your designated objectives. This is also where a more detailed evaluation of features has to happen. The idea is to ensure that more essential capabilities are included in the backup solution so that you don’t trade “easy data recovery” for “easy first-time setup”, for example. A good PoC should be working within your IT environment and not on a demo stand, to make sure the system behaves as expected when moved in production. The testing itself involves not only feature testing, but also stress testing the whole system under a significant load. You should also test the vendor’s support team, their responsiveness and effectiveness as well as their documentation. To succeed, clearly define your objectives and success metrics, and set a realistic timeline for all tests in order for the PoC to be time-efficient.

5. Finalize your choice & update DR procedures

At this point, there should be little or no doubt about choosing your specific enterprise backup solution. Creating your disaster recovery and business continuity plans around your new backup solution and its capabilities is essential. This is the final step of the process – ensuring that you have a detailed rulebook that specifies what actions are taken to protect each and every part of your system and what needs to be done if your system suffers some sort of data breach.

Who are the most frequent enterprise backup solutions users?

• Government and military organizations. Both military and government organizations work with information just as much as any other commercial company, if not more often. However, the requirements for data security and backup capabilities in these cases are much more strict and extensive, meaning that most backup solutions could not operate within these boundaries without completely changing their entire backup process. Thus such organizations require true enterprise-grade solutions for backup.
• HPC data centers. HPC data centers are created to analyze large data masses for analytical or AI-oriented purposes, and big data in large-scale, high-transactional databases is how these data masses are stored for further analysis or processing. However, protecting massive data volumes is not something that every backup solution can – and in addition, this information needs to be as secure as every other data type. Enterprise backup software is the only obvious choice for such organizations, but beware -there are barely a handful of solutions that can meet the typical needs of a true HPC environment. One example of a true HPC backup solution would be Bacula Enterprise.
• Research organizations. Many organizations in the R&D field are generating massive data amounts regularly. The data in question is necessary for various processes, and protecting such data is paramount for any business. The data in question can include datasets for analysis tasks, data for complex simulations, personal medical information, experiment results, etc. Many of these organizations are running IT environments that are getting close to HPC specifications.
• Fintech field. Plenty of financial tech businesses are obligated to interact with massive data volumes regularly – be it banks, investment firms, insurance businesses, etc. Much of this involves processing data in real time. Extensive data protection solutions are necessary for all this data to be protected while remaining compliant with PCI DSS, SOX, and other regulations.
• Healthcare field. There is an entirely separate field of work with its own set of regulations regarding sensitive data storage, and that is the healthcare field. Businesses dealing with protected health information must comply with regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA. Introducing an enterprise backup solution in this sphere is nearly always necessary in order to correctly protect its data, ensuring fast data recovery in case of a disaster and providing data continuity for a very demanding industry.
• E-commerce and retail. Customer data that retailers collect regularly involves a lot of different information – from transaction records and payment data to inventory information and so on. A lot of this data must be protected per one or several regulatory frameworks. Enterprise backup solutions exist to protect and safeguard information like this, combining compliance with protection in a single package.
• Universities and Education. Universities and other educational organizations typically produce and store significant data volume, whether students data, administrative personnel data, research data and science projects. Because of the sheer amount of data, the educational sector typically requires enterprise-level backup solutions to mitigate risks, and to manage and protect its data.

The future of enterprise backup and recovery

The entire enterprise-grade backup and recovery industry has been going through a metamorphosis of sorts, adapting to the new situations. The average IT environment is far more complex and data-rich than ever before, and legacy data protection methods are increasingly struggling to protect large volumes of complex information.

Enterprise backup solutions must now change to a proactive approach, moving far beyond reacting to existing issues and preventing potential problems before they manifest. The ability to monitor sensitive data at all times is far more resource-demanding than regular data protection methods. Still, it also provides better protection, lower downtime, and fewer chances of data loss.

Implementation of ML and AI features are also increasing in this industry, elevating the potential of existing tools to a new level regarding task optimization and process automation. The same could be said for application-aware backups, granular recovery, higher security and many other relatively new requirements in the industry.

There is a lot more emphasis on data security now than ever before. Data breaches are extremely common these days, and features such as access control, encryption, and immutability are becoming borderline mandatory for any enterprise-grade backup solution. Unfortunately, this trend is set to continue. The best enterprise backup solutions work constantly to try and keep ahead of constantly developing data breach methods and approaches by threat actors.

The future of this industry as a whole is moving towards backup solutions being faster, more secure, and more versatile at the same time. Expanding upon new advancements and functions in the field is how modern enterprises can ensure the safety of their information at all times.

The impact of enterprise backup solutions on environmental sustainability

There are multiple key values that enterprise backup solutions try to strive towards, including customer success, trust, innovation, and so on. Other, less-known values also exist, although they don’t get as much recognition in comparison. Sustainability is a good example of such a key value – even if it is as important as the rest. The idea of sustainability as a key value of a backup solution implies that there are multiple long-term values being created between different stakeholders to cover social, ethical, economic, and cultural dimensions.

Environmental concerns have been at the top of global discussion in many different industries and specialty fields, and the importance of the environment as a part of sustainability is at its highest right now. It would be wrong to assume that an industry as software-defined as backup solution software cannot contribute to this in any way. On the contrary, there are solutions such as Bacula Enterprise that can offer many different examples of how they attempt to reduce the environmental impact of their work while also promoting sustainability.

Bacula utilizes a variety of different green practices to reduce the overall environmental impact of its work, including both energy consumption and carbon footprint. The computing resources of the software are optimized to reduce energy consumption, and server virtualization reduces the requirement in terms of physical servers, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint and energy reduction once again.

Bacula’s software attempts to support and extend the hardware’s lifespan as much as possible while utilizing the available resources with maximum efficiency. The inherent customization allows for only necessary functions to be used regularly, resulting in generally better user experience and the ability to adapt to various sustainability goals from many sectors and industries.

The majority of Bacula’s employees are still working from home, drastically reducing the carbon emissions from daily commutes, and the software’s ability to work with an especially large number of different software and hardware providers makes it a lot easier to set up the most sustainable and efficient supply chain possible without worrying about compatibility issues.

Other features and capabilities of Bacula that assist sustainability in some way include complete data deduplication support, extensive integration capabilities with multiple cloud storage providers, extensive sustainability reports, and an open source base, which greatly impacts sustainability. Bacula’s extensive range of sustainability practices and technologies creates a standard for sustainability as a whole.

Conclusion

Enterprise backup solution market is vast and highly competitive, which is both a positive and a negative factor for all customers. The positive factor is that the competition is at an all-time high and companies strive to implement new features and improve existing ones to stay ahead of their competitors, offering their customers an experience that is constantly evolving and improving.

The negative factor, on the other hand, is that the wealth of options makes it extremely difficult to choose one single solution for your company. There are so many different factors that go into choosing an enterprise backup solution that the process itself can become really tough.

In this article, we have attempted to present a long list of different enterprise backup solutions with all of their unique features, positive and negative sides, user reviews, etc. An enterprise-grade backup solution is a sophisticated combination of features and frameworks with the goal of providing a multitude of advantages to end users in the form of large-scale enterprises.

There are many different elements that an enterprise-level backup solution consists of, including flexibility, mobility, security, feature variety, and many others. Choosing the appropriate backup solution for a specific company is a long and arduous process that can be made slightly less complicated using a sequence of different steps presented in this article. As for the specific solution recommendations – our list included a variety of interesting enterprise backup software examples for all kinds of clientele.

Commvault might be an option for a large enterprise that is not shy of spending extra to receive one of the best feature sets on the market. Acronis Cyber Backup is a great choice for larger companies that are dealing with a lot of sensitive data, as it can offer one of the most sophisticated data security feature sets on the market. Veeam is another highly regarded player in the enterprise backup and disaster recovery market, known for its robust solutions that cater to a wide range of environments, including premium capabilities in virtual environments.

Alternatively, there are also backup solutions such as Bacula Enterprise that can offer especially high security, flexibility and scalability. It offers coverage to companies with many different storage types in place – from physical drives to virtual machines, databases, containers and clusters, with up to 10,000 endpoints covered at the same time. Its non-capacity-based licensing model presents the opportunity to make savings over other vendors. Bacula typically provides ultra-fast data recovery, and an exceptionally broad range of features, ranging from fairly common to extremely unusual, and even some technologies that are proprietary, such as Global Endpoint Deduplication, Filesystem Deduplication, or Progressive Virtual Full backup type.

All in all, figuring out a specific solution for your company is no easy task, and we hope that this article was helpful to you in providing as much information about a number of different offerings as possible.

Why you can trust us

Bacula Systems is all about accuracy and consistency, our materials always try to provide the most objective point of view on different technologies, products, and companies. In our reviews, we use many different methods such as product info and expert insights to generate the most informative content possible.

Our materials offer all kinds of factors about every single solution presented, be it feature sets, pricing, customer reviews, etc.  Bacula’s product strategy is overlooked and controlled by Jorge Gea – the CTO at Bacula Systems of Bacula Systems, and Rob Morrison – the Marketing Director of Bacula Systems.

Before joining Bacula Systems, Jorge was for many years the CTO of Whitebearsolutions SL, where he led the Backup and Storage area and the WBSAirback solution. Jorge now provides leadership and guidance in current technological trends, technical skills, processes, methodologies and tools for the rapid and exciting development of Bacula products. Responsible for the product roadmap, Jorge is actively involved in the architecture, engineering and development process of Bacula components. Jorge holds a Bachelor degree in computer science engineering from the University of Alicante, a Doctorate in computation technologies and a Master Degree in network administration.

Rob started his IT marketing career with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, performing strongly in various marketing management roles for almost 10 years. In the next 10 years, Rob also held various marketing management positions in JBoss, Red Hat, and Pentaho ensuring market share growth for these well-known companies. He is a graduate of Plymouth University and holds an Honours Digital Media and Communications degree.