Backing it up: Cloud backup and recovery

Today the only thing that companies which have moved to the cloud are worried about is losing their data there - and with good reason. Data is burgeoning at an alarming rate, especially with big data on a rise. IBM says, about 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone and that's because every day we are creating around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. And this figure is going to see an exponential rise in the next couple of years.

This data congregates from everywhere: social media posts, purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS signal, searches, blog posts, digital pictures and videos and sensors used to gather climate information to name a few. This is what we mean by big data. It has created a flood of data that when categorized, analyzed and organized would reveal habits and trends about us and of society at large.

With all this on rise, recovery and backup are turning into challenges for the IT teams. Cloud computing has its own set of challenges and the major being restoration of information that enterprises store in the public cloud. Due to this, public cloud spending is ballooning at a very high rate.

First things first

Understanding the difference between backup and recovery is very important. Both seem similar but are different. Backup is just a copy of a file or information that is stored somewhere in the cloud and is any non-critical data - for instance, someone’s PowerPoint presentation. It can be recreated.

On the other hand cloud data recovery includes creating an infrastructure that's capable of finding information and copying it, when needed. It includes backing up critical data like customer information and restoring the information if needed. With cyber attacks on a high, cloud data recovery is of utmost importance. Companies don't get to know if they are hacked until days or weeks later. Regulators expect them to get the files back, but extracting information of one customer from a hoard of millions is a tricky task.

What are your options?

There is too much confusion in the market regarding the recovery options for the cloud. You can get some help here. Uptime and system availability, which are the front end of data issues, are mainly focussed by the public cloud vendors instead of giving recovery the prime importance.

All time availability of the systems to the users would not solve glitches that arise like read/write error, which causes corporations the need to recover data. Also, few vendors recover only their own data and not the customer's. They don't take the responsibility if the user deletes his files or if they get infected by any virus. In this respect, we have two emerging vendors Veeam Software and Commvault Systems that have well built on-premises systems to offer. There are also some startups which focus only on cloud data recovery as a service.

Taking care of business

Cloud data services that are being constructed today are majorly in silos because the market is relatively new and still lacks maturity. Users with AWS would need a second backup system and Azure focuses on backing up only its own data. Cloud-specific, third-party tools that are available don't work with all the applications. So in all it's really important who you choose and why.

If you want to have a recovery to your backup or want to know more about cloud recovery options, please get in touch anytime.