Whom do you trust as your backup?

Today’s Verizon Business announcement of a Remote Backup and Restore service is just one glimpse of what next-generation networks can logically deliver to enterprise customers — and for that matter, consumers.

As a managed service, Remote Backup and Restore is a simpler, more effective and cheaper way to make sure valuable data automatically is backed up than almost any of the alternatives. Verizon Business worked with leading IT organizations to create the service and roll it out and, according to Current Analysis analyst Counse Broders, is ahead of the industry in doing this.

Broders admits this is a classic “no-brainer” service, and I have to agree. In the case of the enterprise, the other best option today is manually backing up each day’s data on tapes and transporting the tapes to a separate storage facility. Restoring data from those tapes requires the enterprise to reverse that cumbersome process.

By contrast, the Verizon service gives PC users a simple Web interface and IT managers a Web portal.

Already, Verizon and Qwest are offering their consumer customers what amount to digital storage vaults online to enable them to protect their growing store of digital media — photos and videos, mostly — from being destroyed.

Because network service providers have global, or at least national, mesh networks for protection and because they already operate massive data centers, backup and restore services are a natural extension of something they already are doing.

Not moving into this kind of managed service offering opens the door for other companies — think Google, for instance — that also have massive, well-connected data centers and relationships with consumers and businesses.

As Broders points out, Google Postini already offers a backup service for e-mail and could break into the general backup service category as well.

It makes more sense for network service providers to capture this space as a value-added service for their IP networks.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.