Backing up Data – Common Issues we are Seeing in the Market
Over the last months I observed three key issues and trends related to backing up data. I hope you find this useful. In general, the biggest learning I had was the businesses leaders that adopt a “lines of defence” approach to protecting data are the ones that sleep easiest at night! The 3 biggest learnings I had are:
Number 1: Adopt the golden “3-2-1 rule”
Good practice dictates the 3-2-1 rule must be in play : that means you should have at least 3 copies of your data (this includes the active data running in production), it should be stored on 2 separate storage media and 1 copy should be stored offsite.
Number 2: Offsite versus Onsite – create an “air gap”
It is crucial to have an ‘air gap’ between the production data and a copy of your backups, protecting those offsite backups from security breaches at the primary production centre. It is vital to have a separate copy in case the primary backup repository goes offline. More importantly, security is a new key consideration. There are more exposures to ransomware attacks, and a high risk that your onsite backups could also be contaminated. Having a copy of your critical data stored offsite is a stepping stone to true disaster recovery, it’s the first step required to replicate production data to a secondary location
Number 3: Migrating to the cloud is the time to get back up services in place. Your cloud provider does not own your data – you do!
With the migration to cloud-based and SaaS applications becoming more prevalent, data protection is top of mind. It is a common misconception that when you move to SaaS based applications in the cloud that backups are also taken care of, this is not always the case. The cloud provider hosts the infrastructure or application and ensures uptime and availability; however it is your responsibility to take care of implementing a data protection strategy that aligns with your business needs. Accidental deletion, retention policy gaps, internal & external security threats and legal compliance requirements can all cause significant and irreversible data loss on a SaaS platform. For example, Office 365 holds emails that have been cleared from the Deleted folder in a recoverable folder for a limited time (14 days is the default), after which it is no longer available. Research has shown that the average time between an email being deleted and someone realising that they need to restore that email may be over 100 days, this highlights the need for a comprehensive backup and restore solution for SaaS based data.
The Viatel Vault Backup as a Service offers application level backups providing more granular restore options for many applications including Office365, Active Directory, Oracle and SQL Server
Summary:
The main thing I have learned is not to wait until you are in a data restoration situation before realising your backup solution is inadequate! Talk to us today about Viatel Vault Backup as a Service, how we can help you with your lines of defence:
We can architect, plan and operationalize an effective and secure strategy for you.
If you already have a local backup solution in place, we can easily architect and operationalize to store a second copy in our secure cloud.
We can help you decide what data to include in the regular weekly / daily backups, and manage the size of your backup image (images can grow to become quite large depending on the retention policy in place). Viatel can help with identifying data that is a candidate to be archived off to our FLEXI Cloud Object Storage and excluded from the regular backups of the business-critical data. This improves the efficiency of the backup process as well as freeing up valuable capacity on the local storage infrastructure.
To learn more about BUaaS reach out to us on email, info@viatel.com, phone @ 01 256 9200 or chat to us on our website. We have the customer support you require on the ground here in Dublin, 24x7x365.
