The Benefits of Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Solutions from Acronis

Regardless of scale, industry, or region, ensuring business continuity and data availability is the number one priority for modern organizations. Gaps in these abilities can lead to immediate, drastic consequences ranging from skyrocketing downtime costs and customer dissatisfaction to bankruptcy. That’s why organizations are looking for foolproof ways to avoid these threats and achieve stable continuity and availability – and increasingly adopting cloud-to-cloud backup solutions.

With an ideal solution in place, organizations gain easy, efficient, and secure cloud-based backup and recovery capabilities that reduce user expenses and responsibilities while increasing reliability and security. Here’s a quick reference guide to help you discover all of the benefits your organization can look forward to with cloud-to-cloud backup solutions, plus some of the key differentiators that Acronis cloud backup services offer.

Cloud-to-cloud backup is the process of backing up data stored on one cloud backup service – whether a popular public app (like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace) or a private one – to another. This practice gained popularity with individual users, businesses, and service providers for three main reasons:

Cloud-to-cloud backup solutions automate cloud backup service processes, eliminating the need for internal IT staff to manage and maintain the solution because the backed up data is protected end-to-end by a software as a service (SaaS) vendor. Cloud-to-cloud backup services place the responsibilities of data protection and data availability on professional vendors; this is particularly handy if you have no IT team, or a team of one, that’s managing every IT need for your business.

Cloud apps and services are now more available than ever. As more services have taken to the cloud and more users have become accustomed to cloud-based experiences (e.g. Microsoft Office and Google Workspace), the number of vendors offering cloud SaaS products have grown as well (e.g. Salesforce.com and Slack). With more organizations offering cloud-to-cloud services, you gain a wider variety of options to choose from, covering a greater variety of needs and use-cases.

Cloud-to-cloud backups save you money by eliminating storage hardware costs. Replacing your large on-premises backup storage solutions with a cloud-based alternative decreases initial hardware expenses, on-going maintenance costs, and expensive data-availability delays.

Even with all of these points in mind, today the most compelling reasons for organizations to invest in cloud-to-cloud backup solutions are to:

• Stay ahead of ever-evolving cyberthreats
• Cope with varying and complex IT demands

Whether you’re protecting and accessing the files on your personal laptop or you’re a managed service provider (MSP) responsible for a portfolio of businesses (and their growing amounts of data), cloud apps are essential in the modern digital world.

Today data is more diversified – and more at risk – than ever before. Users rely on cloud-based apps like those we’ve mentioned to complete day-to-day tasks that keep business moving. Unfortunately, this explosion of cloud-based services outpaced the growth of data defenses – many cloud apps promise their own infrastructure resilience but leave customer data unprotected.

From accidental deletion and retention policy gaps to malicious insiders, malware, ransomware, and beyond, cloud-to-cloud backup solutions address a wide variety of cyberthreats. Automatic or scheduled data and application cloud-to-cloud backup services protect data in a separate, secure data center, ensuring that a copy of the data you create, store, and share in cloud apps is safely retained in an off-site location. This approach ensures that data can be quickly and reliably restored anywhere and any time it’s needed.

Acronis recognizes that in the modern age of cyberthreats and data volume explosions, everyone – from an individual user to the most expansive global service provider – can benefit from the security, flexibility, and affordability of cloud-to-cloud backup solutions. That’s why all Acronis backup and recovery solutions include cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities that ensure backing up and recovering data, applications, and systems is easy, efficient, and secure.

To match the most important demands from each user type – personal users, business users, and service providers – cloud backup service capabilities vary between different Acronis solutions. Consider the following use-cases

Cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities:

Microsoft 365 • Outlook • OneDrive

Acronis True Image empowers users to protect all the personal information they store in Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, as well as virtual machines through full image backups that can be stored anywhere and recovered anytime. On top of all these defenses, Acronis True Image supports Microsoft Outlook or OneDrive through streamlined cloud-to-cloud backups. Users can safeguard their emails, attachments, files, and folders against accidental deletions, service interruptions, and a myriad of cyberthreats with Acronis True Image’s cloud backup service – rapidly backing up data to the Acronis Cloud where it’s encrypted and password-protected.

If this data needs to be restored at any point in the future, users can rely on the same cloud-to-cloud backup solutions they already used to recover specific data – from a single file, email, or attachment, to a complete account and all the contents stored within it.

Cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities:

Microsoft 365 • Exchange Online • OneDrive for Business • SharePoint Online

Google Workspace • Gmail • Drive • Contacts • Calendar

Acronis Cyber Protect (formerly Acronis Cyber Backup) offers a cloud deployment option. This model allows an in-house IT team (even if it’s a team of just one) to manage and maintain a modern cloud backup solution for the entire business. When it comes to cloud-to-cloud backups, it helps businesses make the most of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace without needing to worry about the security and availability of the data that’s created, stored, and shared on these cloud apps. Users can leverage simple, secure cloud-to-cloud backups of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data to ensure rapid recovery (with greatly reduced recovery time objectives) while staying compliant with industry regulations.

Should business users ever need to recover data protected by Acronis Cyber Protect's (formerly Acronis Cyber Backup) cloud-to-cloud backup service, they can efficiently search through all their backups and granularly restore the exact files, emails, and event notifications they’re missing. Of course, if a large scale data loss event occurred, users can count on their cloud-to-cloud backup solutions for a complete restoration in just minutes.

Cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities:

Microsoft 365 • Exchange Online • OneDrive for Business • SharePoint Online

Google Workspace • Gmail • Drive • Contacts • Calendar

For service providers and managed service providers, Acronis Cyber Backup Cloud’s robust data protection includes cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities that boost revenues while ensuring seamless business continuity for business customers and complete data privacy regulation compliance. Users can automatically extend cloud-to-cloud backup solutions to their clients or separate this cloud-based backup capability to offer as a standalone upsell service. Given the nearly universal usage of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, selling these cloud-to-cloud backup solutions can quickly become a valuable new revenue stream.

Through Acronis Cyber Backup Cloud’s centralized management console, users can easily and efficiently defend all of their customers’ Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data – along with every other aspect of their IT environments – while ensuring consistent data availability and business continuity to each and every customer.