Disaster Recovery & Backup

Data protection is a dynamic challenge with ever-changing needs. Many businesses and organizations protect their critical data with backup, making it one of the key components of a company’s Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Strategy.

Companies and people are very dependent on data. Whereas a person cannot survive without air, water, and food, businesses cannot survive without data. Forty percent of companies that do not have proper backup or disaster recovery plans in place do not survive a disaster.

Every company must designate a Backup Administrator to handle the entire backup strategy, including backup solutions and tools; the backup scope, schedule, and infrastructure; the network and storage, recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), etc.

It is extremely important that your company has a backup strategy and solution in place. Otherwise, you can be a statistic.

There are multiple types of backup solutions and tools available on the market that deliver different RPOs, RTOs, and handle different scopes. Here are the most popular ones.

These appliances often include storage, which comes as a 19” rack-mounted device that you install and connect to your network. The appliances are easy to install and configure. In most cases, you do not need to provision a separate server, operating system, or install any software. The agents installed on your systems perform the backups, and you access the solution via a graphical interface provided with the appliance.

However, remember that if you have a hardware appliance and it fails, you lose your entire data backup solution. Even if you backed up to a secondary location, you need to re-provision the backup solution before you can recover, which increases your recovery times.

Software solutions are installed on your own systems and handle the backup process. Many solutions allow you to use existing systems, but some require dedicated servers provisioned just for backup. For these, you need to install and configure the operating system and the backup software. In many cases, you can install the software on a virtual machine (VM).

Compared to hardware appliances, software solutions offer greater flexibility, especially if your infrastructure changes often. Also, software solutions can be less expensive than purchasing a hardware appliance bundle and they also allow you to choose and provision your own storage.

Numerous vendors offer backup-as-a-service (BaaS) – a cloud-based offering that allows you to provision and run your backups from the vendor’s or service provider’s cloud infrastructure by installing lightweight agents on your machines. The BaaS is even simpler than software because there are no systems to provision and no operating systems to configure.

Of course, if your organization deals with sensitive data or is subject to regulatory requirements, you will need to check if cloud backup with a BaaS solution is acceptable.

The latest innovation in the backup world is all-in-one hybrid backup solution, which gives you the freedom to install the software or use it as a cloud service at will. These solutions combine the best of both worlds, making them the best choice for many organizations.

A copy of your data is stored in backup storage, and you must have it selected, provisioned, and handy for successful backup (and recovery).

If you have enough capacity on your local disks, you can back up to them or to external USB drives. These backups are fast and convenient and you don’t need a network. The downside of local backups is that if the system is destroyed by fire of flood, your backups can be destroyed as well if they are stored in the same location. Also in many cases, you need to manage these backups on a computer-by-computer basis, which makes it cumbersome for larger environments.

Local and USB disk backups are best for quick backups of a small number of systems and are designed for the recovery of individual files or systems in the event of software failure.

This is one of the most common storage options. With a centralized NAS (Network Attached Storage), SAN (Storage Area Network), or simple network share, you can store many or all company backups in one place and restore a file, system, or the entire data center in the event of a virus attack or data corruption. Yet as with local disks, NAS and SAN will not help you recover data in the event of a major area disaster, such as a hurricane or typhoon that destroys your entire facility.

The modern alternative to tape backup is cloud storage. With this type of solution, you subscribe to a certain storage capacity in the cloud vendor’s or service provider’s data center. You do not need any hardware as you do with tape drives, but you do need an internet connection to send backups to the cloud. Your vendor may have ways to eliminate the problems with uploading large amounts of data by offering physical data shipping or initial seeding program.