Iron Cloud Data Backup

Iron Mountain provides a robust cloud data backup strategy designed for resilience against cyber threats. Our approach includes creating an immutable, air-gapped copy of your critical data. This isolates your backup from your live network environment. This separation is a critical defense mechanism. It effectively prevents ransomware from encrypting or corrupting your backup data, preserving a clean recovery point for your server backup and other essential business information.

• We provide a secure, logically isolated recovery vault that is completely disconnected from your primary network, which provides a fortified defense against lateral threats moving through your systems.
• Our service allows customers to store a clean copy of data offsite, making it inaccessible and invisible to malware targeting the production environment.
• The system uses immutable storage, meaning that once data is written, it cannot be altered or deleted for a set period, which protects backup integrity from malicious encryption attempts.

Our managed cloud backup services are structured to facilitate a rapid and reliable recovery process. In the event of an attack, your business can restore operations from the untouched, air-gapped data copy. This minimises downtime and financial impact. We focus on providing a secure pathway for ransomware recovery, giving your organization confidence in its ability to withstand sophisticated cyber attacks and maintain operational continuity with effective data backup solutions.

Iron Mountain’s cloud backup services are engineered to protect a wide spectrum of business data assets. We handle everything from physical and virtual server backups to critical enterprise applications and databases. Our solutions are adaptable to complex IT environments. We provide comprehensive cloud data protection for data generated across your entire organization, whether it resides on-premises, in private clouds, or within public cloud platforms like AWS and Azure.

• Our backup solutions cover physical servers running various operating systems and virtual machines across platforms like VMware and Hyper-V, providing unified data protection for hybrid infrastructures.
• We offer specialised backup for business-critical applications and databases, including Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange, to maintain transactional consistency and application availability.
• The service extends to protecting data stored in SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, safeguarding emails, documents, and collaboration data from loss or corruption.

Our approach simplifies backup management for diverse data sources through a centralized platform. This unified view helps you manage policies, monitor backup jobs, and execute recovery tasks efficiently. As a third-party provider (3PP), we streamline the entire lifecycle of your data. This process includes everything from initial backup to secure data restoration and migration when you need to move or recover critical information for business continuity.

Choosing Iron Mountain provides access to decades of expertise in data protection and information management. Our enterprise cloud backup solutions combine advanced technology with physical security protocols at our regional distribution centers. We operate as a trusted partner, offering more than just software. We provide fully managed cloud backup services that are tailored to meet specific business needs for security, compliance, and recovery, supported by a global infrastructure.

• We leverage over 70 years of experience in secure data management to offer business backup solutions that are built on a foundation of trust and reliability.
• Our services integrate physical and digital security, storing your data in highly secure facilities that are protected by stringent access controls and environmental safeguards.
• As a professional third-party provider (3PP), we deliver customized contract services that align with your organization's specific recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

We focus on building long-term partnerships to help businesses navigate complex data challenges. Our team works with you to design and implement a comprehensive cloud data backup strategy. This strategy supports your goals for operational resilience and information governance. Our comprehensive Iron Cloud data management portfolio delivers a complete solution for protecting your most valuable assets throughout their lifecycle.

Cloud backup is a service that automatically copies files, applications, and server data to a secure, remote location. Its primary purpose is to provide a restorable copy of data in case of loss or corruption. Cloud storage, on the other hand, is designed to supplement your active storage capacity. It functions more like a networked hard drive for storing and accessing files. It offers a place to put data but lacks automated backup processes.

• A cloud data backup solution is designed for disaster recovery, creating periodic copies of your data that can be used to restore systems to a previous state.
• Cloud storage services are primarily used for data synchronization, file sharing, and collaboration, extending your local storage capabilities rather than creating a recovery point.
• Backup solutions typically include features for versioning, allowing you to restore data from multiple points in time, a feature often absent from basic cloud storage.

Understanding this distinction is critical for developing an effective data protection strategy. While cloud storage is useful for accessibility, a dedicated cloud backup service is essential for business continuity. It provides the mechanisms needed for a full recovery after a data loss event. Businesses often use both but for different purposes, sometimes involving a cloud storage and migration plan to move archived data to less expensive storage tiers while keeping backups ready for recovery.

Cloud data protection is a core component of any modern business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. It enables organizations to recover critical systems and data quickly following an unexpected disruption. This could include a hardware failure, cyberattack, or natural disaster. By maintaining an offsite copy of data, businesses can restore operations at a secondary location. This capability significantly reduces potential downtime and limits the financial and reputational damage of an outage.

• Managed cloud backup services establish clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), defining the maximum acceptable time for restoring business functions after a disaster strikes.
• These services also define Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) to determine the maximum age of files that must be recovered for normal operations to resume.
• Using remote regional distribution centers for data storage adds a layer of geographical separation, protecting your backups from local events affecting your primary site.

Effective cloud data backup makes your business more resilient. It moves data protection from a capital-intensive model to a more flexible, operational expense. A third-party provider can manage the complexities of server backups and data recovery. This allows your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives. Integrating physical media protection, such as through offsite tape vaulting, can further enhance a BCDR strategy by creating a physical air gap that protects critical backup data from online threats.

When evaluating a managed cloud backup provider, security should be the top priority. The provider must demonstrate robust security measures, including end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest. You should also verify their compliance with industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI DSS. A provider’s ability to meet these standards is a key indicator of their commitment to data protection and their suitability as a partner for your business.

• Look for a provider with a proven track record and expertise in your industry, as they will better understand your unique data compliance and operational challenges.
• The provider's data centers should have physical security controls, redundant power, and environmental protections to safeguard the infrastructure hosting your critical business data.
• Assess the provider's technical support capabilities, including their availability, expertise, and service level agreements (SLAs) for response and resolution times during a recovery event.

Scalability is another critical factor. The best backup solution will grow with your business without requiring a major overhaul of your data backup strategy. The provider should offer flexible service tiers and a predictable pricing model. This allows you to scale your storage and protection levels as your data volumes and recovery requirements evolve. A provider offering information governance advisory services can also add significant value by helping you align your backup strategy with broader data management goals.

The best backup solution for a hybrid IT environment is one that offers centralized management for all data, regardless of its location. A unified platform is essential. It should be capable of protecting workloads running on-premises, in private clouds, and across multiple public cloud services. This approach eliminates the need to manage multiple, disparate backup tools. It simplifies administration, reduces complexity, and lowers the risk of gaps in your data protection strategy.

• An effective business backup solution for hybrid environments provides a single console to manage policies, monitor jobs, and conduct recoveries across all your systems.
• The solution should support a wide range of data sources, including physical servers, virtual machines, enterprise applications, and cloud-native workloads, for comprehensive coverage.
• Look for solutions that offer efficient data mobility, allowing you to easily move backups between your on-premises infrastructure and different cloud platforms as needed.

Flexibility in data recovery is also crucial. Your chosen solution should provide multiple recovery options, from granular file-level restores to full system bare-metal recovery. This allows you to meet different service-level agreements for various applications. Ultimately, the goal is to implement a solution that simplifies the complexities of a hybrid world. Managing the entire IT asset lifecycle management of your data from a single point of control provides consistency and reliability for your entire enterprise.