Cloud Hosting

Cloud adoption is at an all-time high with cloud computing models like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In enterprise environments, cloud is already playing an integral role in reducing data center footprint, optimizing business processes and delivering great value-for-money experience.

Speaking of cloud adoption, here are some statistics by Statista aboutthe state of the cloud in 2017. 2018 and the expected growth rate in 2020:

The flexibility, scalability and availability that CloudService Providers (CSPs) offer have made it simply the go-to choice fornumerous enterprise use-cases. Verily, cloud storage tiers are a good optionfor business and organizations of all sizes ranging from Small to Medium-sizedBusiness (SMBs) to large enterprises.

However, theres one thing that cloud adopters need toremember about cloud storage technology: it does not protect from data loss.

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), like Microsoft Azure, AmazonS3, Google cloud and other public clouds, take responsibility for dataavailability.

Data availability means that CSPs only make sure that yourdata is available but protecting data from data loss due to threats likeaccidental deletion, malicious deletion, ransomware attacks, viruses, malwareetc. is the data owners (your) responsibility. Therefore, its imperative thatalong with cloudstorage, reliable and effective data backup measures are set up to preventdata loss.

But before we talk about these backup or data protectionmeasures, lets try to draw a clearer line between data availability and dataprotection or data security.

Microsoft Azure and Amazon use geo-replication to replicateyour stored data to different servers in the same data center. Andadditionally, the data is replicated between different data centers as well.

This is done to make sure that if a server in Azure orAmazons data center fails, you dont feel any discontinuity or unavailabilityof data. If the primary copy becomes inaccessible, the system fails over thesecondary copy (or replicated copy) and data accessibility continuesseamlessly. And with replicas of data stretched across data centers, these CSPsensure that you dont feel any disruption even if an entire data center goesdown.

You might be wondering, Thats great and all, but whathappens when a virus affects a volume or when a file is accidentally deleted?

The answer: theres no built-in failsafe for that. If afolder is deleted, then the real-time replication features make sure that itsdeleted from all replicas or secondary and tertiary copies. In other words, thevirus, the file deletion, or malicious encryption, is replicated across allcopies of the data whether its within the same data center or betweendifferent data centers.

So how can you protect business-critical files, folders andVirtual Machines (VMs) running in the cloud? You can do so by backing up yourdata stored in the cloud.

By setting up backup and Disaster Recovery (DR), youllensure that in the event of a ransomware attack, virus infection, accidental ormalicious deletion, you still have backup copies that can be used to recoveryour data.

It goes without saying here that backup copies are not thesame as the replicas created with geo-replication or sync & asyncreplication services.

For more detailed insight on the difference between cloudbackup, cloud storage and cloud sync, we highly recommend thisblog.

Thus far, weve established:

Now that weve established that its important to backupdata stored in the cloud, the two consequent questions are:

Data owners have a couple of options when it comes tosetting up backups for data stored in the cloud. The best option variesdepending on specific requirements, budget, internal policies, IT staffexperience, and applicable industry regulations.

Following are a number of generally applicable & securebackup options for enterprise data owners using cloud storage solutions:

If your IT framework is open to setting up an in-house datacenter, then one option is to set up a dedicated backup & DR appliance. Thepurpose-built backup appliance creates backups of the data stored in the cloudand keeps copies in the on-premises infrastructure.

If youre already in possession of backup software, then the fully integrated backup system can be replaced by a secure backup targetstorage; which can be a NAS or SAN storage appliance.

With this setup, data owners can keep backup copieson-premises and restore quickly. Not to mention, when considering the long termROIs of on-premises infrastructure versus cloud, on-premises infrastructure hasgreater potential to deliver better value-for-money experience.

If your organization is more in favor of serverlesscomputing, then cloud-to-cloud backups are the right choice for you.

Cloud-to-cloud backups are exactly as they sound like. Byleveraging backup software, data owners backup NAS or SAN volumes stored in thecloud or VMs running on cloud HCI to another cloud repository.

The specifics of the backup strategy and execution varydepending on the chosen backup software vendor and supported cloud integration.

For instance, Veeam isnow venturing into the cloud-native backup world by offering backups forVMs & data stored in AWS and/or Azure. With Veeam software, enterpriseusers can backup their data running in AWS to another repository provisioned inAWS; and the same goes for Azure.

Similarly, other backup software vendors are either alreadydoing this or beginning to come up with similar options for enterprise users.

This should answer the first question: how to backup datastored in the cloud? Now lets talk about how to do it effectively?

There are two major parts of any backup solution:

Which backup software best suits your requirements? Tochoose the right backup software, you need to have clear answers for thefollowing questions:

The second thing that you really need to pay attention toare the data security features of your backup target storage. For instance, thefollowing is a list of very desirable features or data services for backup datastorage:

If your backup target storage has these capabilities, thenyou can be rest assured that your business-critical workloads are safe andsecure from a number of cyber-security threats.

Cloud technology is cost-effective, reliable and itintroduces operational efficiency to several business processes. Consideringthe volume that digitally transformed businesses have to process, cloud storageis definitely a great option.

However, without secure cloud backups, data stored in thecloud is vulnerable to data loss and consequent disruption and downtime.Therefore, its imperative for businesses going serverless to setup backup& DR solutions to ensure data loss prevention and business continuity.

More:
Data Stored in the Cloud Needs Backup Heres Why - TechiExpert.com