Small-office and home-office workers have traditionally been the mainstays of the online-backup sector. The typical individual user has only a few gigabytes of common data types to store, an always-on Internet connection and few document-management needs.

But now, online-backup services are poised for a corporate growth spurt, according to an IDC (International Data Corp.) research report released in January. IDC projects the market for online-backup services will grow to $715 million by 2011, up from $235 million in 2007.

Expanding storage options

IT managers, facing an explosion of data, are preparing to take online-backup options as seriously as traditional off-site disaster-recovery and regulatory-compliance backup and retention options. The challenge for service providers is to show that online backup is secure and will not adversely impact other network operations.

Online-backup services share several common traits. They use the Internet to transport data to remote storage facilities. They offer automatic backup during a PC’s idle clock cycles or scheduled backup during nonoperational hours. Administrators can tailor backup schemes to each PC served. Disaster-recovery and backup restorations are performed via the Internet, too.

Where online-backup services differ is in the details of pricing, speed and off-site storage enhancements. The best online-backup services transport only the portions of data that have changed or been created since the last backup, conserving bandwidth. They also feature bandwidth throttling to prevent the backup transmission from consuming all of your bandwidth. Pricing is often published and straightforward for simple backup services, but it must be obtained from sales reps when disaster recovery and other enhanced document-management services are desired.