For any organization, their data is the most important thing that ensures the continuity of their business. Many organizations have a common goal to enhance their skill to recover from sudden incidents such as data loss and system failures, especially when natural and manmade disasters take place. As creating their own disaster recovery infrastructure can be too expensive for most of the organizations.
In this article, we will see how to take advantage of public cloud to suffice your backup and disaster recovery solution as well as some common but best backup practices.
Giving priority to the local protection
Everyone is aware of that the use of public cloud is growing tremendously; as due to its ability to provide unlimited server and storage resources virtually. Also, the public cloud is completely flexible as because you have an ability to increase as well as decrease the server resources as required and can utilize the operational budgets (OPEX) rather than using the capital budgets (CAPEX).
However, when you think of performing the data backup and recovery, 99% of the time the performance is delivered through the local resources (i.e. on-premise) to the machines.
Understanding and identifying the criticalness of the machines to business
If you decide to prioritize the local protection as your first line of defense, then probably the public cloud-based protection would be your second line of defense. You must determine the servers as well as the sensitive data that requires offsite disaster recovery protection. This can be done by identifying the most important business services that are necessary in daily operations in order to meet your organization’s goals. Also, there are many other dependents such as databases, middleware, etc… that are vital to the services and business continuity. You need to ensure the protection of these dependencies in the public cloud.
Find out alternatives to traditional backup for disasters
Most of the times, organizations considers only the large-scale disasters (losing entire server), however, there are many such incidents such as small app crash and data loss due to man-made mistakes like accidental file deletion or file overwrite. In such cases, the data loss may not be realized easily, but it is possible that in such cases the organizations may need the recovery of a single file.
Most of the traditional backup solutions, takes a full backup of your data. In such a case, you have to perform complete backup of your data, which increases your bandwidth usage (upload) making it an expensive solution. A solution like “R1Soft Backup and Recovery” can help you perform multiple point-in-time snapshots of your data. The incremental backup feature allows you to backup only those files in which changes are made on daily basis. The incremental backup helps in network I/O savings as well as storage consumed over the full backup.
Determining the way you want to restore and backup the data to meet the goal
Well, performing the backup of the system and storage will ensure the protection of everything on that operating system, which is perfect when you need to restore the complete environment with the use of “Bare Metal Recovery” feature. However, what if you want to protect just a database like Windows MySQL and MS SQL? In such a case, if you using the R1Soft CDP solution, you don’t have to worry about it as it allows you to backup Windows MySQL and MS SQL databases online with minimum disk I/O load and impact. But, if you decide to use any other backup solution, ensure that the backup agent offers such feature to protect your databases.
Think of backing up above the hypervisor level
Definitely, virtualization has powered the web hosting industry in a very unique way leading it a step ahead towards the future. The virtualization has offered various capabilities, including an ability to perform backups at hypervisor level of the VMs. However, this kind of backup creates a perimeter where you are able to restore to only a VM level; moreover, you can restore the files within the VM.
A fact that, if a virtual server fails then probably all the VMs created on the server will be at risk, hence it is better to run the backup agents within the VM operating system rather than just on the virtualization host.
Storing backups for long-term in the cloud
Usually, the storing of data is done for various reasons; the most important among them is for corporate requirements and to suffice regulatory requirements. Storing disk-based backups for long-terms on the company’s servers can be too costly, instead organizations can make use of public cloud storage to maintain backups and archiving old files for a long-term. Using public cloud as storage for long can be better cost-effective alternative solutions for low-budget organizations.
Verifying the security of data in public cloud
As the continuity of a business depends on its corporate data, it is necessary to consider the security of the data when moving data in the cloud. If you decide to move your organizations data in the public cloud, ensure the kind of security used to protect your data in that environment.
For example, physical security of the location where the public cloud is hosted, encryption of the data when the data is at rest, isolation of your data from other organizations with the same cloud backup provider. Also, verify the encryption method used to protect your data while sending it over the network to the public cloud.
Choose a quality cloud hosting provider who will offer you the best Backup and Restore solution to ensure the protection of your organizations data.
