Hybrid cloud backup is quickly becoming the gold standard in business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). By combining the strengths of local and cloud storage, hybrid solutions ensure that IT service providers can offer faster recovery, stronger cybersecurity resilience, and simplified management and compliance across environments.
It’s no surprise that businesses are embracing hybrid cloud backup, considering the intense pressure to safeguard data from today’s frequent and sophisticated cybersecurity threats and attacks. As bad actors evolve, so must our defenses, which means adopting the latest infrastructure advancements to meet changing cybersecurity threats.
Below, we break down how hybrid cloud backup works, why it outperforms public or private-only backups, and how to leverage x360Recover from Axcient™, a ConnectWise company, to move beyond traditional backup methods.
Key takeaways
- Hybrid cloud backup combines local speed with off-site resilience to minimize downtime and data loss.
- Relying on both on-prem and cloud backups provides a ransomware backup strategy and protects against natural disasters and infrastructure failures.
- Using hybrid cloud backup simplifies compliance with industry regulations by ensuring off-site and redundant data protection.
- Automating backup and recovery processes reduces management complexity and human error across IT environments.
- A scalable hybrid backup solution allows businesses to adapt to growth while meeting evolving security and recovery demands.
What is hybrid cloud backup?
Hybrid cloud backup is a modern data protection strategy that combines the speed of on-premises backups with the scalability and reliability of cloud-based storage. Unlike traditional backup methods that depend entirely on a single location, hybrid backup aligns with today’s distributed IT environments. Whether data lives in physical offices, virtual machines, or the cloud, hybrid backup delivers complete data protection and recoverability.
It works by creating two synchronized copies of critical data:
- A local backup stored on-site using a physical device or local storage server for fast access and near-instant recovery after common events such as accidental deletions, file corruption, or system crashes.
- A cloud backup stored off-site in a secure data center to deliver redundant protection for long-term retention, compliance, and disaster recovery in the event of ransomware attacks, hardware failure, or natural disasters.
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Hybrid cloud backup vs. cloud-only and local-only: Which is better?
Unlike cloud-only or local-only backup strategies, hybrid cloud backup reduces the risk of data loss and the complexity of relying solely on internet-based restores. Not only does this environment offer a flexible way to meet diverse infrastructure needs, but it streamlines BCDR management for consistent service levels. Most critically, hybrid cloud backup guarantees that critical data is accessible even if one location, local or cloud, becomes unavailable.
Hybrid cloud backup bridges the gap left by single-solution backup.
- Local backups are fast, but not disaster-proof: If an office floods, burns, or suffers hardware failure, that backup is toast.
- Cloud-only backups are redundant, but slower to restore: What you gain in off-site safety, you lose with longer recovery times, bandwidth bottlenecks, and unreliable internet connections.
- The hybrid advantage: By using both, you get fast restores for high-performing, day-to-day recovery and secure, scalable off-site recovery for worst-case scenarios and long-term resilience.
The top five benefits of hybrid cloud backup
Hybrid cloud backup offers a powerful combination of performance, reliability, and scalability. Here’s how it can benefit your business:
- Faster recovery with local backups: For everyday incidents such as accidental deletions or minor system failures, restoring data from a local device is the quickest way to resolve issues. Hybrid backup enables near-instant recovery, delivering uninterrupted business continuity and meeting competitive recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) even during major outages.
- Geographic redundancy for disaster resilience: When a larger disaster occurs, such as a ransomware attack, natural disaster, or major outage, the cloud component of hybrid cloud backup maintains accurate and recoverable backups. The geographic separation of immutable backup copies is crucial for ensuring business continuity in the event of encryption-based attacks.
- Reduced bandwidth and storage costs: By using local backup for the most common daily restores, you can reduce the frequency of large-scale cloud retrievals, lowering costs and accelerating data transfers. Additionally, comprehensive hybrid systems offer compression, deduplication, and bandwidth throttling for optimized performance.
- Simplified compliance and audit readiness: Many industries, such as healthcare, finance, and legal services, require off-site backups as part of their regulatory compliance requirements. Hybrid solutions check that box by default, while also providing automated documentation and reporting for simpler audits. Reinforce your capacity to support HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2 compliance, or introduce a new revenue stream more easily with hybrid cloud backups.
- Scalability for modern IT environments: As businesses grow and change, so do their backup needs. Hybrid cloud solutions are designed for scalability, enabling businesses to protect physical, virtual, and cloud workloads from a single pane of glass.
Implementing a hybrid cloud BCDR strategy
When constructing a hybrid cloud BCDR environment, you have two primary cloud options to weigh:
- Leverage a private cloud to host high-priority or sensitive business data.
- Use more budget-friendly public cloud platforms for less critical or infrequently accessed data.
The best-fit approach depends on factors such as the current IT infrastructure, security requirements, industry regulations, and data sensitivity. In many cases, especially when private cloud resources are limited, public cloud services provide a flexible way to efficiently layer data protection. This layered visibility enhances control over how data is stored, monitored, and protected, supporting stronger continuity and faster recovery.
When implementing a hybrid or public cloud-based solution, it’s important for businesses to evaluate how each component of the environment aligns with business demands and risk tolerance. Important layers to assess include:
- End user applications and business services
- Development platforms and management tools
- Cloud orchestration and system monitoring
- Network configuration and connectivity
- Storage architecture
- Physical and virtual server environments
- Data center capabilities and capacity
Rolling out hybrid cloud solutions doesn’t have to be complex, especially when working with a vendor that understands your operations. When managing dozens or hundreds of endpoints, solutions that streamline deployment and monitoring through a centralized dashboard will drastically reduce operational overhead. The key to successful implementation lies in the following:
- Assessment: Evaluate the environment and identify RTOs and RPOs to determine what’s most critical to protect.
- Configuration: Customize backup frequency, retention policies, and recovery procedures based on your needs.
- Automation: Take advantage of automation tools for scheduling, monitoring, alerting, and reporting to minimize manual oversight and errors.
- Training: Make sure your technicians are trained not only on the technical aspects of the solution but also on how to position it as part of a broader BCDR strategy.
How x360Recover delivers hybrid cloud efficiency
Axcient, a ConnectWise company, empowers IT providers with x360Recover, a powerful and flexible BCDR solution designed to protect data across both on-premises and cloud environments. With options for appliance-based or cloud-only deployment, businesses can tailor data protection strategies to fit their unique needs, all from a unified platform. Here’s how:
Streamlined management: A centralized platform with single sign-on provides an intuitive interface for managing backups, recovery, and continuity across diverse environments. By consolidating tasks into one system, you reduce overhead and eliminate the need to juggle multiple tools.
Direct-to-cloud protection: By backing up data straight to the cloud, without relying on local appliances, businesses minimize the need for on-site hardware, lower operational costs, and simplify support of remote or distributed endpoints.
Fast cloud-based failover: When local systems go down, cloud failover capabilities, such as pre-configured runbooks using Virtual Office, enable rapid recovery, ensuring business continuity even in the face of severe outages.
Automated replication: Automating the process of syncing backups between local and cloud environments protects current and available backups across the hybrid cloud infrastructure, eliminating the need for manual effort and minimizing the risk of discrepancies.
Geo-redundancy: To further safeguard customer data, Axcient offers Geo+, which replicates backups across geographically separated cloud data centers. This adds another layer of protection against regional disasters, ensuring data availability even if one cloud region experiences an outage.
Flexible scalability: x360Recover adapts to business growth by combining the affordability of public cloud services with the control and security of private cloud options. You can easily scale resources with pooled storage at a flat fee, ensuring long-term performance and value as your demands evolve.
Take the next step in hybrid cloud backup
Whether you manage customer environments as a managed service provider (MSP), or oversee in-house infrastructure as an IT leader, hybrid cloud backup has evolved into a must-have strategy for modern, resilient, and scalable data protection. With the right solution in place, you can deliver faster recovery, stronger security, and greater flexibility while reducing operational overhead and improving data protection outcomes.
Ready to take your BCDR offering to the next level?
Download the 2025 Hybrid Cloud Backup Essentials eBook to get a deeper look at hybrid backup best practices, solution features to prioritize, and how to position hybrid cloud for internal success. Whether you’re refining your current strategy or building a new one, this guide will help you in 2025 and beyond.
And if you’re not familiar with ConnectWise and x360Recover, start your free 14-day trial today to see how efficient and effective hybrid cloud backups can be.
