Backup & Disaster Recovery

Of the cloud journey paths, Backup & Disaster Recovery is worth a particular look. A cloud migration project represents a great opportunity to design, or rethink, a disaster recovery plan. A hybrid cloud architecture is then the ideal environment on which to choose a data repository on a secure and protected cloud.

In the majority of implementations, a portion of private clouds, or an on-premise structure “reconverted” to a private cloud, is the container which will archive the backup of all corporate information and data generated by the applications during daily operations. Creating a secondary storage environment dedicated to data archiving is also preparatory to the application of a disaster recovery plan, in other words a detailed protocol to follow in the event that the primary systems are inaccessible.

There can be various reasons for an interruption in corporate services: a natural disaster, a ransomware attack, or one of many potential malfunctions in the main data center. In order to protect against any eventuality, generally a backup environment is created which is physically distanced from the primary site, and it is protected by the creation of a “virtual castle” with a single drawbridge. This means that the repository will not be connected to the wider Internet most of the time, and the drawbridge will be lowered only when the incremental backup is carried out. Managing the security of the archived data is the responsibility of the cloud security services, and is a priority: the integrity of the archived data is the first guarantee required from cloud backups.

The backups may also be of different levels and can make use of different types of physical media depending on the frequency at which a given data set must be made available.

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The awareness that cloud environments – both public and private – have become the ideal location for implementing a backup & disaster recovery plan is confirmed by the growth in popularity of the acronyms BaaS (Backup as a Service) and DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service). These two acronyms, which analysts in term group together under DPaaS (Data Protection as a Service), incorporate all the application services for managing backups and automated recovery activities following an interruption to the primary services.
For a migration project to a hybrid cloud which makes use of an AWS environment, the component providing for backup & disaster recovery can be managed via the tools provided by AWS itself – such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) – supported by other, even more powerful, ones.

In this case too, the AWS partner implementing the project draws enormous benefits from the use of tools designed to be native and perfectly integrated with any AWS service.