5 Hidden Costs of Cloud Backup

Getting Data Into and Out of the Cloud

Hidden Cost No. 4: Getting Data Into and Out of the Cloud

Getting your data into and out of the cloud has both hard costs and soft costs beyond network egress fees. The impact of those costs depends on which option you use to move your data – a WAN connection or physical seeding. The most obvious method to move data to and from the cloud is to send it over a WAN connection. However, this may not be ideal for moving large amounts of data because, even with a high-speed Internet connection, transferring multiple TBs of data can take a substantial amount of time.

Physical seeding is an alternative method to get an initial set of data into the cloud without having to wait days or weeks to transfer many TBs. Physical seeding uses physical disks and overnight shipping to quickly create an initial dataset in the cloud. Media is sent to the cloud provider to “seed” the initial full set of data and avoid the WAN challenge.

Physical seeding can greatly speed up the cloud backup initialization process, reducing setup time from weeks to a single day, even for hundreds of TBs. However, not all vendors offer a seeding option and almost all charge a nominal fee for it.