In the past, the only means a business had of backing up their most important data was with expensive tapes drives. These required a multitude of standards making them complicated and overly time-consuming. Tape drives were unreliable and would often simply not work when told to backup system files. They required a lot of management and offered no guarantee that the backup would go smoothly or even be successful. If a company needed extra security for their data, these tapes were not only stored on-site but had to be stored off-premises as well, resulting in even more expense to the business.

If there is one major thing that cloud backup services have provided for businesses of every size, it’s that it has turned a highly burdensome, tedious, expensive task into a much more simple, cost-effective process. Gone are the days of fickle tape drives. This is especially important today, because now more than ever, businesses are generating data at lightning speed.

In 2016, for example, market specialists revealed that businesses within the global data sphere generated about 16.1 zettabytes. According to IDC, that number will increase to around 163 ZB (that’s 1 trillion GB) by the year 2025. With that amount of data flying around, it is absolutely essential for businesses to keep their sensitive data backed up and protected.

Fortunately, cloud backup services for business makes data backup easier than ever. Cloud backup services have revolutionized the way we store and backup data in several ways.

For one, a combination of smart software and cloud scalable storage removes the issues with unreliable tape drive backups. Second, this scalability saves on cost, because you only pay for what you use, when you use it. Third, the cloud has given rise to a huge number of cloud storage and cloud sharing services for businesses.

According to the market research group Statista, in 2018 the most popular applications that were migrated into the cloud were backup related.