The importance, risks, benefits and limitations of the public cloud.
What would your organisation do if your cloud provider suffers a sudden outage? Most public cloud SLAs (service-level agreements) revolve around data durability, and not data protection. When it comes to accountability, there has been a shift in perceived responsibility for data breaches. In 2019, a Cloud Security Alliance study found that three out of five organisations surveyed believed their cloud service providers should be held responsible for breaches. This misconception points to an urgency for organisations to take ownership of their business-critical applications on the cloud. The big public cloud providers agree – they will keep the platform available, but the customer data is the customer’s responsibility. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, increased cloud adoption and cloud data protection have been high priorities, as access to local data centres has been reduced.
Business benefits and risks
Many organisations are adopting cloud backup as part of an overall IT modernisation strategy. Moving to the cloud is seen as a modern, agile way to do business. Pricing is also a factor, with elastic pricing being attractive. Organisations can move from a multiyear capital expenditure (capex) storage purchase to an operational expenditure (opex) monthly payment for cloud storage.
The pay-as-you-go nature of cloud fits into IT transformational goals. In a recent survey, 72 percent of Commvault’s cloud customers said their data protection environment is changing due to IT transformation.
Because cloud is elastic, globally accessible and highly available, many organisations are choosing cloud backup options to replace storing backups in a physical data centre. Perhaps a bigger benefit is that backup technologies that cross on-premises and multiple cloud environments assist with data and application mobility between these platforms.
Most cloud moves are driven by cost, agility or innovation demands. The cloud offers a flexible storage location that is globally accessible. The flexibility, scalability and availability of cloud has prompted many IT teams to shift workloads to the cloud, applications to SaaS (software as a service), and move to a cloud disaster recovery model that can be supported by a global workforce in the current ‘work from home’ world.
With a cloud backup solution, the backup data can be held in immutable recovery points. In a cyber security attack, even if the backup infrastructure is part of the attack the data itself will be safe for recovery.
When is native backup not enough?
Cloud vendors are creating highly secure, highly available and highly durable cloud services. The innovation is incredible, moving very rapidly and providing new platforms for businesses to transform with. Today’s public and private clouds are very good at what they do, but they do not provide an enterprise-grade backup and recovery system.
Native cloud providers help data and workloads stay persistent online and usable, but their current tools are not designed to backup, granularly recover or extensively meet the data recovery SLAs of enterprise organisations. Cloud backup software provides the scope, scale and proven methodology to cover the data protection needs of your cloud environment.
Many native tools require manual processes, ‘recipes’ to follow, and/ or writing scripts, all of which are susceptible to human error, which can create problems with the execution, leave data exposed or cause failures in the process. The native tools are also native to each cloud provider’s environment – a genuine issue in a multi-cloud world.
Native cloud backup tools usually do not provide deduplication. Most organisations find huge storage savings with cloud backup deduplication tools, saving storage time, cost and effort.
Native cloud backup tools also do not provide indexed granular recovery. If you solely need to recover a file located within a virtual machine, most native cloud recovery options – and many smaller cloud backup products – do not allow for this. With cloud native backup, you may recover an entire snapshot, but you will have trouble finding exactly the information you need with no backup indexing.
A cloud backup software product can automate processes, saving time. For example, Commvault software has native integration into today’s top public cloud providers. Native integration reduces the effort required to meet SLAs and local regulatory requirements.
In addition, enterprise-grade cloud backup software offers speed, reliability and flexibility that native cloud tools cannot offer, including:
- high speed recovery, instant accessibility, portability to different infrastructures and a platform to provide governance and insight
- error checking, restartability, efficient deduplication, compression and reporting on migration processes, and
- data stored and recovered in usable formats.
