Availability in the cloud
One of the great things about the cloud is that availability is built in. All of the cloud services provide this. Amazon’s relational database service (RDS) automatically backs up your database instance to Amazon S3 for the duration that you specify. Additionally, you have the option to manually create snapshots, which are retained until you choose to remove them. The snapshots are the same as full backups. In addition, in AWS, they have regions, and within each region, there are availability zones. There is built-in availability with automatic failover within the regions. This is a great cost savings for cloud-first startups. They can use these built-in availability cloud features and not have to purchase an additional backup-as-a-service.
The other thing to think about is that each SaaS service that you use provides automatic backups of the data within their service. For example, SalesForce provides at least 30 days of backups. For small- and medium...