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Leveraging The Public Cloud For Disaster Recovery & Backup

As businesses become wholly reliant on technology, system failure is a huge threat and often one that has lasting repercussions and a severe impact on bottom line. With this almost constantly in mind, companies are always looking for robust data recovery options should a system failure occur. Building a complete disaster-recovery infrastructure can be costly, but having as many options as possible is key to limiting negative impact. Thus, many businesses are now considering the best ways in which they can use the public cloud for disaster-recovery and backup as they scale operations.

How Secure is your Solution?

The public cloud has somewhat of a poor reputation when it comes to security, with many businesses believing it simply doesn’t offer enough. Security levels differ with every host, so it is important to verify the security features used if you are considering backing up data or files in the public cloud. This should include understanding the physical security at the location of the public cloud, the encryption of data being stored and the separation of your organisations data from others using the same public cloud. You should also find out how data is sent over the network to the public cloud and what encryption is used to protect the data during transmission.

Identify Critical Services that Need Backing Up

Businesses should prioritise the servers and data that need offsite disaster-recovery protection by identifying key business services that are critical to day-to-day operations. Making sure the dependencies of those critical services (databases, middleware, etc.) are understood ensures that they are also protected in the public cloud.

Different Levels of Backup

There are many different levels of backup to be considered and mapping out backup goals is key to understanding which level is required for your business. It may even be that multiple levels are needed for individual departmental silos. Backing up a system and all storage assets will protect everything on the operating system, which is perfect if needing to restore the entire environment.

However, you might want to backup specifics rather than a whole system, for example a database, a specific application or even a single account. This is where backing up becomes more complex and may require a backup agent that understands the service layers being protected.

A Hypervisor Level is Not Always Enough

Virtualisation has given businesses the ability to backup at the hypervisor level of virtual machines (VMs), but this can limit your restore to a VM level only. Always try to run backup agents within the VM operating system as a whole rather than running them only on the visualization host. All VMs on a specific server will be at risk if a virtual server fails, so virtual servers are a great option to consider when looking for a high-availability solution.

The public cloud is a flexible and cost-effective back-up solution for businesses with a wealth of information to manage. Remaining secure is critical to every level of stakeholders’ peace of mind. With a range of backup options available on the market today, organisations can be certain that should a failure occur they have the infrastructure in place to recover as quickly as possible. They just have to choose the right disaster recovery and backup solution in the first place.