Arcserve or Carbonite: Which Cloud Backup Service Stands Out?

Unless you have a highly-experienced, well-equipped, and resourceful IT genius on staff, you’re going to need some help to secure your data for the company and make sure that you’re protected in the unfortunate event that your systems are compromised.

No matter how good your IT guy is, anyway, it’s still going to be necessary to have a backup service, so that you have the added layers of protection and the solutions they provide to be sure your systems get back up quickly if anything happens. Even for small events such as accidental deletions of data, you’ve got to have backup systems in place so that your business can continue to operate normally.

This is exactly why these backup services exist, and they now have resources and technology to do an exceptional job of securing your data. We’re going to compare two leading providers of cloud backup services, Arcserve and Carbonite, to see how they measure up, and more importantly, how they can each give you peace of mind when it comes to the security of your company data and their systems.

Ensure Data Security

To begin with, whatever backup service that you decide to go with needs to make you feel safe; it needs to assure you that all of your company’s data is secure, in every place where it is stored, in every device, location, and application. As this is the core function of cloud backup services, it needs to be rock-solid protection, and that’s what Arcserve and Carbonite will give you through their varied and comprehensive security features.

Your company will naturally have some data that is a higher priority than other data and demands a higher level of protection, so it’s important that your backup service have features to protect that critical data, as well.

ARCSERVE:

Though you may not have heard of them before, Arcserve has been in the game for a long time and has developed comprehensive solutions to secure your data across every system you may have. For UNIX, x86, non-x86, and any other system, for private and public clouds, physical and virtual servers—they can all be managed from a central console.

Arcserve makes absolutely sure that critical data is prevented from being damaged or lost, based on the priorities that you provide, and they secure the rest of your data, as well, after priority systems are secured. No matter what happens, you can restore all of your data and return to 100% operational systems with “near-zero data loss”.

CARBONITE:

Carbonite has provisions to back up any servers that you have on or off-premises, and they also provide services to back up your data centers if needed. One of the most notable features that you’ll find with Carbonite is that they implement the most updated and current backup technologies to combat the constantly-evolving, diverse threats to your company data.

Those who are setting out to attack your systems and cause a breach don’t simply use the same technology and tactics; they are always coming up with new ways to break in. Carbonite protects any physical or virtual servers that you may have, no matter what systems you have, and what’s more is that they are happy to work with you to create a custom-fit data backup solution for your business.

If any event does occur in which any of your company data is compromised, then the backup services are fully capable of handling it and will minimize downtime to get your operations back up and running as quickly as possible.

Endpoint Protection

Your endpoints, or all the devices associated with your business which are transmitting company data, are some of the most vulnerable targets for malicious attacks and accidental data loss. We typically concentrate on the main hubs where data is stored, such as our servers, but just as the “Internet of things” can fall prey to cyber-attacks, our computers and mobile devices can be a primary source of data loss.

First, simply because there are so many of these endpoints, increasing with the size of your business, and secondly because data is transferred to and from those endpoints so commonly and even haphazardly.

It’s imperative that you have measures in place to secure those endpoints to be sure that any mistakes or malicious threats are not allowed to compromise critical company data. With all the potential weak points within the devices used by your company, and even the personal devices of employees, there is always the possibility that those endpoints can be taken advantage of and attacked.

It is also inevitable today that numerous smartphones, laptops, and other devices will be transmitting critical data within your company because the increasing use of technology in any kind of small business makes them an extremely vulnerable source.

ARCSERVE:

Endpoint security is a focal point of Arcserve’s service, and they have a tried and true solution to manage it. Arcserve UDP Workstation Endpoint Protection is designed to, “protect and recover critical business information stored on desktop and laptop computers”. This provision has been acclaimed by users and proven to secure endpoints in a variety of scenarios ranging from malware attacks to accidental deletion.

Backing up data for the actual endpoint devices is another essential feature of the Arcserve UDP, allowing you to perform backups at endpoints as frequently as you want—as often as every 15 minutes if needed, to make the size of each backup smaller to execute them faster.

CARBONITE:

There are a variety of reasons that your company can experience data loss. Accidental deletions, ransomware, lost or stolen devices, device damage or crashes, and other scenarios can all result in catastrophic data loss in some cases, which is why endpoint protection is so vitally important.

Carbonite puts a great amount of effort into making sure you’re prepared for those events, providing you with features like the QuickCache, which lets you back up data at LAN speeds, using your own internal network. They provide protection and data-loss prevention deployment for businesses and organizations of any size, for all endpoints—desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

Minimize Downtime

Aside from the extremely troubling experience of losing critical company data—or worse, a full-blown cyber-attack—the worst part is arrested or diminished operations within your business that are essential and can cost you real sales and upset your existing customers, depending on how tech-reliant your business is.

One of the worst aspects of a cyber-attack or any data loss catastrophe is the downtime a business can experience when it happens. A cloud backup service needs to keep critical operations running during those times, and it needs to get full operations back up and running as quickly as possible because the longer systems stay down, the more damage it can cause to your infrastructure and your reputation.

It’s not just data that can be lost, but new and existing customers can potentially be lost, and the sales that you would otherwise keep if all your systems were functioning normally.

So, to accomplish the preservation and restoration of data systems that you need to stay running, both Arcserve and Carbonite have solutions that are set up with the specific purpose of restoring systems as quickly as possible while minimizing or completely avoiding the loss of your data.

ARCSERVE:

Arcserve has a fully-integrated platform with comprehensive data protection across all of your systems and endpoints to boost uptime significantly, in the event of attack or accidental data loss.

At any time, even if there is no event, you can monitor all of your systems and the status of the backup services from your management console to make sure everything is functioning as it should be. To make sure that your system priorities are observed, as well, Arcserve will meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), and service-level agreements (SLAs).

If something does occur which causes an interruption in service for your business (which can happen more often than you think—we don’t plan for these things to happen), then you will want to be sure that vital systems are taken care of first, and then all the rest shortly thereafter. That’s exactly what Arcserve promises to do. They boast some of the fastest recovery times in the backup service industry.

CARBONITE:

Carbonite also gives you the fast recovery times that you will need, restoring your systems extremely quickly. Their service claims to, “limit downtime to seconds or minutes, not hours or days”, which is exactly what you want to hear from your backup service because, all too often, a data breach can cause service interruption that lasts way too long without the protection of this service.

Just think of the times you were using an online service for your business that suddenly just stopped working, and when you visited their website or Twitter page for an update, it casually noted that the service should be restored in an hour, or two, or three.

Those scenarios are more and more common because information is increasingly being traded between sources over the Internet, passing through the cloud from one server bank to another. And so, without taking measures to protect your data as it passes over the open Internet, from one server to another, there is an ever-growing risk of your company data being compromised.

That’s why it’s so important to employ services like Arcserve or Carbonite to have your back and ensure the security of your data and your systems. Carbonite has an excellent feature that automatically, instantly reroutes users to a “secondary target” immediately, as soon as a user experiences any interruption.

It’s not something you have to initiate from a control panel or even think about to decide what action you need to take because the service activates that feature completely automatically. There are also some cases wherein there is simply no room for failure.

If you have certain critical systems that can never be allowed to fail, Carbonite offers a provision for this, which is their “high-availability” feature that provides businesses with zero-downtime solutions to make sure those high-priority systems always stay up and running.

End Thoughts

There are just way too many possible ways that your company data can be compromised or lost, whether it be from simple mistakes made by employees who have critical data on their smartphones for whatever reason, from malware that’s infected those same phones, or from an all-out cyber-attack.

As a business, when you don’t have a service that is there to protect you from those events, you’re needlessly leaving yourself open to disaster, and there’s no reason to leave yourself open because services like Arcserve and Carbonite have painstakingly created solutions that prevent you from ever needing to deal with the aftermath of malicious attacks or unforeseen data loss from endpoints across your company.

The vulnerability of the devices used by employees, alone, leaves you exposed to possible catastrophe, just through casual, daily transfer of data. The potential for a breach just through the devices used by your company is so high, and it is one of those weak points to which you never give much thought, even though it’s one of the most common points through which attacks can occur.

It’s somewhat alarming that your business will experience a breach or at least fairly minor data loss at some point, but you can prepare yourself for those events by equipping your business with a service like Arcserve or Carbonite. Not only will they back up, protect, and store all of your company data, but they will make sure your systems get back up and running fast if anything happens to compromise your data.