The Cloud has now become an integral & ultra-important part of the digital world that lets organizations manage large volumes of complex data with ease. It further helps them ensure high data availability and accessibility at all times, thereby providing a robust recovery mechanism in case of any unprecedented failure. Cloud-based Replication thus plays a crucial part in ensuring the smooth functioning of the business processes and systems. It further helps organizations scale along with their growing data needs as they expand across platforms, regions, etc. without degrading the performance.
This article focuses on Cloud Replication and aims at providing in-depth knowledge about Cloud Data Replication, its advantages, disadvantages, and how it fairs against traditional replication mechanisms. It will also provide you with a comprehensive list of some of the best Cloud Data Replication tools available in the market to help you select the right tool for your business.
Table of Contents
Understanding Cloud Replication
Data replication refers to the process of transferring or copying data from a database of your choice from one server to another. It helps boost and maintain high data availability & accessibility, thereby facilitating data sharing and recovery. Organizations leverage the power of data replication to copy their data to the cloud to eliminate silos while addressing the increasing demand for real-time responsiveness. It helps them draw crucial insights and make data-driven decisions to drive growth & innovation across departments.
A successful cloud initiative requires organizations to chalk a plan on how they want to replicate their data to the cloud server. To do this, they need to find a cloud-based data replication solution that is reliable, easy-to-implement, cost-effective, and helps transfer data from on-premises source systems to cloud-based destination systems with ease. By copying on-premises data to the cloud, enterprises can leverage cloud economies of scale-like data warehousing, application migration, and analytics.
Cloud Vs Traditional Data Replication
Cloud Replication refers to the process of replicating data from on-premises storage to the cloud, or from one cloud instance to another. Traditional data replication involves replicating data across different physical servers on the company’s local network.
The following table provides a comprehensive comparison of the features of these two data replication strategies:
| Cloud Data Replication | Traditional Data Replication |
| Data is replicated from physical storage to the cloud, or from one cloud instance to another. | Data is replicated from one physical storage to another within the company’s local network. |
| It uses fully-managed remote servers located across the town or the county. | It uses in-house hardware and software that is owned and managed by the organization. |
| Cloud-based software and resources follow a subscription-based pricing model, allowing users to rent them on a monthly/annum basis. These form the operating costs. | On-premise hardware and software, require users to purchase them at once, thereby making them a capital expense. |
| It is cost-effective as it only requires you to set up an account with the cloud service provider to start the replication process. | It requires you to invest in hardware and software licenses, and hence it has a high up-front cost. |
| It only requires you to have an active internet connection to start the replication process. | You may not need an active internet connection to perform traditional data replication. |
Advantages of Cloud Replication
The following are some of the advantages of Cloud Data Replication:
- High Availability: Cloud Data Replication keeps your data offsite and away from the premises. In case the primary instance is destroyed by a major disaster like fire, storm, flood, etc., your secondary data instance will be safe in the cloud, allowing you to recover data.
- Cheap: Replicating data to the cloud is much economical than replicating and maintaining data in your data center. It helps minimize costs associated with managing the data center, including hardware, software, support cost, etc.
- Scalable: Cloud Replication houses the support for on-demand scalability. It allows users to either increase or decrease their storage requirements as their business expands or contracts. It doesn’t require users to purchase additional hardware.
- Secure: Most cloud service providers provide a fully-managed service and are solely responsible for maintaining physical and network security. It is, therefore, quite beneficial for a small business that lacks proper security staff.
Disadvantages of Cloud Replication
The following are some of the challenges associated with Cloud Data Replication:
- An active internet connection is needed to perform Cloud Data Replication.
- Data replicated to the cloud is prone to security breaches as the cloud is easily accessible from all parts of the globe.
- The enterprise has to develop trust in the third party to store its data.
Here’s a list of some of the best Cloud Data Replication Tools available in the market, that you can choose from, to simplify data replication. Selecting the right tool for your business needs has never been this easy:
Top 5 Cloud Replication Tools
Choosing the ideal Cloud Data Replication tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of data replication tools available in the market. To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of the 5 best Cloud Replication tools that you can choose from and start replicating data with ease:
1) Hevo Data
Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, can help you replicate data from 100+ sources swiftly to a database/data warehouse of your choice. Hevo is fully-managed and completely automates the process of monitoring and replicating the changes on the secondary database rather than making the user write the code repeatedly. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
Hevo provides you with a truly efficient and fully-automated solution to replicate and manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
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Check out what makes Hevo amazing:
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
- Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to export.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Completely Managed Platform: Hevo is fully managed. You need not invest time and effort to maintain or monitor the infrastructure involved in executing codes.
Pricing Model of Hevo Data
Hevo Data provides users with three different subscription offerings, namely Basic, Starter and Business Plans, with the Basic plan starting at $299/month. Hevo Data also provides users with a 14-day free trial. You can learn more about Hevo Data’s pricing here.
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2) Carbonite
Carbonite is a robust data backup tool that houses an easy-to-use interface, allowing organizations to replicate their data without having any technical skills in a matter of minutes. It provides users with an intuitive web-based dashboard, allowing them to copy, monitor, and access their data with ease. It leverages advanced encryption mechanisms and provides users with enterprise-grade security, thereby keeping their data safe while in transit or storage.
Pricing Model of Carbonite
It provides users with three subscription-based offerings based on the number of computers you have in place, with the basic plan for 1 to 3 computers starting at $6/month.
For further information on Carbonite, you can check the official website here.
3) AWS Migration Service
AWS Migration Service is one of the most popular and secure data replication services by Amazon that allows users to migrate their data from numerous data sources, databases, etc. to AWS (Amazon Web Services) quickly and securely. It ensures that the source database remains fully operational during the migration process, thereby reducing the downtime associated with applications dependent on the source database. You can use the AWS Data Migration Service to migrate your data to and from widely used open-source and commercial databases.
Pricing Model of AWS Migration Services
AWS Migration Services follow an instance class-based pricing model and charges users based on the type of class instance they have in place and the hours of consumption. It allows users to leverage the migration free of cost, in case they are transferring data to Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, or Amazon DocumentDB for six months.
For further information on AWS Migration Services, you can check the official website here.
4) Veeam Backup and Replication
Veeam Backup and Replication is a robust data-center-based backup software that houses intuitive functionalities such as asynchronous data replication, cross-platform replication, instant failover mechanism, simulation/testing, orchestration, dashboarding, etc. It allows users to not only replicate their data but also transform the data and carry out analytics and numerous tests to draw crucial insights, helping them make data-driven business decisions.
Pricing Model of Veeam
It provides users with three subscription offerings, namely Veeam Backup Essentials, Veeam Backup and Replication, and Veeam Availability Suite, with the Veeam Backup Essentials plan available at $460/annum. You can also make use of the Veeam pricing calculator to determine the exact and unique cost for your business data needs. It further provides users with a 30-day free trial as well.
For further information on Veeam, you can check the official website here.
5) Nakivo
Nakivo is a robust data backup and replication tool that follows an integrated approach to data protection, ensuring that your critical applications and data remain safe. It provides users with a diverse set of functionalities, best-in-class product and customer support, along affordable pricing. It allows users to backup & replicates data to the cloud, tape, etc. It also provides support for disaster recovery orchestration for physical, virtual, SaaS, and cloud environments.
Pricing Model of Nakivo
Nakivo provides users with five different subscription offerings, namely Basics, Pro Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise plan, with the “Basic Plan” starting at $99/socket. It further provides users with a free trial.
For further information on Nakivo, you can check the official website here.
Conclusion
This article provided you with in-depth knowledge about Cloud Data Replication, its advantages & disadvantages, along with a comprehensive comparison of Cloud Replication vs Traditional Replication approaches. It also provided you with a list of some of the best Cloud Replication tools available in the market today to help you make the right choice.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution, that will not only help you transfer data but also transform it into analysis-ready form, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will take care of all your analytics needs in a completely automated manner, allowing you to focus on key business activities.
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Skilled in freelance writing within the data industry, Nicholas is passionate about unraveling the complexities of data integration and data analysis through informative content for those delving deeper into these subjects. He has written more than 150+ blogs on databases, processes, and tutorials that help data practitioners solve their day-to-day problems.