Enterprises have customarily relied on tapes for offsite backups. New disk economics and the compelling price point provided by the storage cloud vendors presents new opportunity to make offsite backups more accessible and reliable.

Oracle's Cloud backup functionality provides the following advantages over traditional tape-based offsite backups:

1· Continuous Accessibility: Backups stored in the Cloud are always accessible – much in the same way local disk backups are. As such, there is no need to call anyone, and no need to ship or load tapes before a restore can be performed. Administrators can initiate restore operations using their standard tools (Enterprise Manager, scripts, etc.) just as if the offsite backup was stored locally. This can help make restores faster and reduce down time from days to hours/minutes in many cases.

2· Better Reliability: Storage Clouds are disk based and thus inherently more reliable than tapes. Additionally, the Cloud vendors typically keep multiple redundant copies of data for availability and scalability purposes.

3· Cost Savings: Lowers or eliminates upfront capital expenditures, as well as tape backup licensing and offsite storage costs.