Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
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Carbonite Endpoint
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Carbonite Endpoint provides an enterprise-grade backup solution for all endpoints, including mobile devices or devices spread across a distributed enterprise network.
I use a mix of online backup solutions depending on the client's needs. If a client that I don't manage monthly needs monthly backups, I typically suggest Carbonite for its ease of use.
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Carbonite Endpoint 360 is a great solution for any organization with compliance needs. Office 365 defaults to a 30 day backup of all data. Carbonite Endpoint 360 extends this well beyond 30 days and provides an all-inclusive source for retention for data in Office 365. Any small to medium business would greatly benefit from this solution as they can design their entire infrastructure in Office 365 and ensure it's all backed up.
Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
It is excellent at automating your backups. You don't need to manually do it, just set it up once and let it run in the background.
It's pretty simple to set up and use. It will automatically suggest the best options that work for most people and you can be up and running pretty quickly.
It's safe and reliable. We have been using it for a couple of years now and had no major issues.
Their phone support is excellent.
It's also really easy to maintain your backed up data to reduce redundancy.
Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
To be honest not so impressed with the amount of time it has taken to get data backed up to the cloud.
I have not had to do a restore at this time so I cannot comment on the restore process.
I was not aware at time of procurement that the upload process would take so long since we were not procuring their hardware. Sales rep mad it seem like upload would only take a day or two and we are now starting week 7 hoping to be done by week 8 for 1.5 TBs of data.
I found their alerting to be very poor. I missed several days of backups without knowledge of this, until I signed into the portal. I would get daily emails reporting backups were in progress or done, but nothing indicating that a backup had been stuck or paused for 3 days. For this reason alone, I did not renew.
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Does what it needs to do quietly and efficiently in the background without interrupting the workflow. It offers instant automated back-ups without troubling the end user. As it is such an automated system, once it is up and running, there is little or no support needed from the service provider. From what I understand the support from Carbonite during the setup and implementation was absolutely fine.
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
We have also used Mozy Pro and Dropbox. They are all pretty similar in functionality/features of backing up data (not system state or databases as I don't think any of the 3 are well suited for that). To me, it comes down to personal preference and choosing a product that is universal for multiple users, for ease of management.
It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
Carbonite Endpoint has demonstrated value in its ability to easily restore seemingly lost files for remote users.
While we haven't yet had to exercise it, knowing we have the option of remotely wiping endpoints containing sensitive data has brought confidence to our management team that we can mitigate data breaches through preventable means.
The privacy issue around device tracking is costing the company in terms of employee trust and morale and needs to be mitigated with appropriate messaging and/or disabling of this feature.
