by Imed Bouchrika, Phd
Cloud-hosted applications are now performing business critical functions, with 73% of organizations using multiple clouds (Splunk, 2022). Personally, all of the apps that I use are software-as-a-service (SaaS) or web-based. To say that cloud has taken over IT infrastructure is an understatement because, in reality, IT infrastructure is now in the cloud.
This presents a significant opportunity for backup software to deliver more services across all types of platforms, whether on-premise, cloud-based, or hybrid. The increasing importance of cyber security programs and initiatives is apparent in the highly connected business landscape. Since data is the main source of business intelligence that informs strategy, organizations are utilizing all the tools available to protect this asset.
This guide presents a list of the best backup software that offers specific backup options for the unique needs of organizations. Key features that provide uninterrupted duplication of data, as well as tools that protect critical assets, are listed for you to have a clear guide in choosing the best backup software for your team. Backup software statistics and trends are also provided for context. Where available, the price is also mentioned to aid in your evaluation.
Accidental deletion, power outages, and spilling coffee over my laptop—these are just a few of the instances when I felt eternally grateful for backup software. Thus far, I have never been asked to ransom the records of my chat history and email. For big corporations that keep huge amounts of data, however, the challenge is different and more complicated than spilled coffee.
The unprecedented digital transformation forced organizations to make new strategic approaches to cyber security. The following backup software statistics paint a picture of an industry that is evolving to accommodate new methods of securing data. The adoption of cloud-based architecture delivered benefits that improved overall operations. However, managing the complexity and cost of a multi-cloud environment proved more challenging.
As a result, security teams are falling behind, with threats getting exponentially more sophisticated as agreed by 38% of IT heads. Making this more challenging is having a security stack that has become overwhelmingly complex, which is another challenge identified by 30% of IT teams, with 28% admitting that moving workloads to the public cloud has made it more difficult to monitor attacks (Splunk, 2022).
Source: Splunk State of Security 2022
Currently, there are multiple factors affecting cybersecurity efforts. Among IT people, 54% experience monthly outages, which result in downtime, 48% point to the growing number of cybercriminals, and 44% see the increased reliance on data as a major factor affecting cybersecurity (CompTIA, 2022). One major driver is the hourly cost of downtime for business-critical apps which is estimated at approximately $200,000. Given this figure, the average annual cost of downtime tied to cybersecurity attacks for organizations today is $33.6 million (Splunk, 2022).
To address this, businesses are firming up the objectives of their cybersecurity strategies, with 72% focusing on initiatives that will protect critical assets, 66% on protecting data, and 58% on minimizing disruption (CompTIA, 2022). Among organizations today, the top driver for backing up SaaS data is to reduce risk (50%), to protect against user error (20%), and to mitigate risks associated with ransomware attacks (15%). Protecting data is one major reason influencing backup software trends among SaaS users (Spanning, 2022).
Source: Spanning SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2022
Keeping and protecting backups is the primary method of avoiding data loss by small and big companies. However, gone are the days when performing a backup is as simple as plug-and-play. With the migration to cloud-based services, protecting data requires a new set of tools. The following backup software trends reflect the strategies being adopted by organizations in order to minimize downtime in case of malware attacks.
Source: CompTIA State of Cybersecurity 2022
While backup software does not prevent cyber attacks, having this platform in place ensures that your workload is duplicated and kept safe at all times. This will significantly reduce downtime, and enable you to keep your operations up and running with minimal disruption. The Research.com team identified the following backup software as among the best based on backup automation tools, recovery tools, replication capabilities, malware detection, and platform flexibility.
Veeam Backup & Replication is a single backup platform for all applications, workloads, and data both in the cloud or on-premise. It provides flexible, simple, and reliable data protection that involves no downtime. The native immutability and instant recovery features of Veeam Backup & Replication ensure your safety from cyber threats.
By helping you seamlessly migrate to a hybrid cloud, Veeam Backup & Replication sees to it that you are able to avoid lock-ins and reduce costs and complexity. This cloud-ready platform provides fast and secure backup for your entire system.
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Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is a backup software for service providers that is equipped with the Acronis Active Protection Technology. It has AI-powered anti-ransomware technology with a built-in automatic recovery system. This backup software uses a set of security metrics to identify gaps and improve overall security.
Through scanning client machines for vulnerabilities, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud ensures that there will be no window for cyber criminals to exploit apps and OS. For remote workers, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud offers prioritized patching and protection for mission-critical telecommute apps.
By quote. The vendor offers a 15-day free trial.
IDrive Online Backup is a backup software for PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices that can be managed from a single account. All your files and folders are synced in real-time across all devices through the system’s Cloud Drive.
A physical storage option is offered for quick backup and retrieval of data via the IDrive Express tool. For a historical data review, IDrive Online Backup uses snapshots and versioning and retains up to 30 previous versions. A web-based console is included for data backup management.
The subscription cost starts at $3.71 per year for one user with 100GB of storage. IDrive offers a Free Plan that provides a maximum of 10GB backup space.
Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is a SaaS backup software that secures, protects, and streamlines data governance. It redefines data resiliency by providing the only at-scale SaaS platform for the multi-cloud environment. Across all physical and virtual workloads, Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is a single and unified console for data management.
This platform bridges the gap in protection by modernizing legacy systems and providing on-premise data protection solutions. Among the backup tools are for Microsoft 365, ransomware recovery, hybrid cloud backup, AWS backup, and disaster recovery.
Pricing for SaaS apps starts at $2/user/month, $8/user/month for endpoints, and $7/server/month for AWS infrastructure. The data center is priced per TB.
Veritas Backup Exec is a cost-effective, fast, and unified backup software that protects virtual, physical, and cloud data. It keeps your data secure and available all the time even while you are performing a backup.
This backup software includes fully integrated support for the protection and recovery of Microsoft 365 workloads, including Exchange and OneDrive. The Ransomware Resilience feature protects backups hosted on a media server from being modified.
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Datto Backupify is a leader in cloud-to-cloud backup that offers the widest suite of automated features. It is easy to use and provides consistent and reliable backups with unlimited storage. Datto Backupify covers Google Workspace backups and Microsoft 365 backups.
Among the solutions offered by Datto Backupify are data retention, ransomware, and SharePoint backup. This platform helps reduce personal and company risk in the cloud and helps restore data due to accidental or malicious deletion, and ransomware attacks.
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Keepit is a backup software that provides backup for Microsoft and Azure AD. It protects your all SaaS data including emails, chat history, and files. This global backup provider covers Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and G Suite. It is a single service that covers all backup needs.
Keepit provides fully automated data protection for core SaaS applications. It has a universal restore view that gives the user control of multiple restore options. Keepit is a single vendor-neutral platform that provides backup and recovery.
Pricing starts at $2.95/set/month with one-year data retention. Keepit also offers a 30-day free trial.
Rewind Backups is an on-demand backup and restoration platform that safeguards your IP with automated data backups. It enables you to recover quickly from simple and complex data mistakes while at the same time mitigating the risk of data loss and downtime.
Unlike other backup software, Rewind protects individual account-level data. The account-level and item-level restores provide full backup coverage. Rewind is SOC 2 compliant and keeps your system audit-ready.
While the pricing largely depends on the type of platform, the subscription cost starts at $39/month for ecommerce sites or $5.67/file/month for SaaS platforms.
Vembu BDR Suite is a cost-effective backup and recovery software for SaaS applications, data centers or private clouds, endpoints, and cloud workloads. It offers a reliable data protection solution through application-aware backup and agentless VM image backup and replication.
For Hyper-V virtual machines, Vembu BDR Suite performs incremental backups through resilient change tracking and automated backup verification. It provides instant recovery at the VM, file, or application-item level.
Pricing for Vembu BDR Suite starts at $12/user/year for SaaS backup.
EaseUS Data Recovery is a complete backup and recovery software for Windows, Mac, hard drives, USB, and more. The EaseUS data recovery wizard is a handy tool for accidental file deletion, virus attacks, sudden system crashes, and unexpected power outages.
Offering effective data recovery solutions for individual users and enterprise and service providers, EaseUS Data Recovery offers other partition recovery, MS SQL recovery, and Exchange recovery. It also provides advanced backup and disk imaging for home and business users.
Pricing starts at $69.95/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Barracuda Backup protects your data and provides ransomware protection by deleting criminally encrypted files. It eliminates malware and quickly restores a good copy of your data. Barracuda Backup restores your systems fast whether from physical appliances, virtual servers, offsite locations, or the cloud.
From any device, Barracuda Backup can recover data. You can choose a snapshot in time or recover a set of affected files. The simple and flexible deployment options ensure that you have a backup running in no time. With Barracuda, backed-up data can be replicated to the offsite location of your choice.
By quote. The vendor offers a 14-day free trial.
AvePoint Cloud Backup is a backup software for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Google Workspace, and Azure. This cloud backup solution lets you bounce back from data loss by providing cloud-to-cloud backup and ensures anytime access, and long-term retention, and prevents data loss.
AvePoint Cloud Backup offers multi-cloud backup, is 100% SaaS, and keeps your data fully protected. It drives IT efficiency, reduces risk, and drives productivity. Even in the event of ransomware, AvePoint Cloud Backup minimizes downtime by performing a quick restoration.
By quote. The vendor offers a 30-day free trial.
Magnus Box is a backup software exclusively designed for technology service providers, computer repair providers, and managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide. From a central dashboard, Magnus Box allows users to remotely manage and control endpoint backups from a central dashboard.
This 100% white label backup software includes a creatable USB recovery wizard, HIPAA-compliant storage in the US and EU, and a free SSL server certificate. the client-side deduplication of Magnus Box saves storage space and does not require full re-uploads.
The platform fee of Magnus Box is $45, with additional fees for add-on services.
C2 Backup for individuals and businesses is a platform that provides full protection for Windows and Mac devices. For individuals, C2 Backup creates a backup for system configuration, user settings, and applications. It allows you to secure multiple versions of all your documents, photos, videos, and audio files.
For businesses, C2 Backup protects on-premise and cloud workloads from a central location. It effectively secures mission-critical data using highly configurable features. C2 Backup offers enterprise-grade security and reliability.
Pricing starts at $49.95/month for 5TB of storage. C2 Backup also offers a 30-day free trial.
Vinchin Backup and Recovery is an easy-to-use powerful VM backup software that protects workloads, including native, remote, and cloud, with zero business interruption. With Vinchin, you can set a full backup, incremental backup, or differential backup depending on your requirements.
Vinchin Backup and Recovery performs image-based and agentless backups by creating an image of the entire operating system. It directly protects the VM through a hypervisor and unlike other platforms, there is no need to install any agent on the VM. Vinchin Backup and Recovery also creates multiple threads for data transmission, which improves overlap processing speed.
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It pays to be proactive when it comes to securing your data. Compared to starting all over again after a system crash, having backup software in place ensures fast recovery in case of malware infection. The list of backup software we have provided includes platforms that offer essential as well as unique features. This software offer protection for all types of environments, support for applications, and flexibility that allows you to choose where to store your data. Some even utilize blockchain technology to enhance security.
While there is no definite way to completely avoid cyberattacks, performing regular backups and adopting a platform that continuously duplicates your data is a sure way to secure your workload and reduce downtime. Data backup software teams can manage and mitigate threats, and help you recover fast.
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by Imed Bouchrika, Phd
