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feature > cloud backup
IT’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO REVIEW THE TERMS OF SERVICE AS YOU FORMULATE A DATA PROTECTION PLAN.
If, on the other hand, a subscriber accidentally deleted or modified some of its own data, the provider might not be willing or able to perform a restoration for the subscriber. This level of protection is very common among SaaS providers, so it’s extremely important to review the terms of service as you formulate a data protection plan.
Fortunately, cloud services have existed for long enough that enter- prise backup vendors have begun to provide plug-ins to protect the data residing within some of the more popular SaaS applications. Even so, the backup vendors don’t provide protection for every SaaS application, and the level of protection provided for a SaaS application might be somewhat lacking.
Take Microsoft Office 365, for example. There are a number of backup vendors that offer backup solutions for Office 365. Of the backup products available, most do a good job of protecting Exchange Online. However, many of the backup vendors don’t have a solution for protecting Office 365 applications such as SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business; and those that do offer the ability to back up SharePoint data often have extremely limited capabilities.
When it comes to backing up SaaS data, the best approach is to talk to the cloud provider directly and ask what it recommends with regard to data protection.
Of course, protecting an organization’s data requires more than just identifying the resources that need to be backed up, and determining the best backup mechanism to use. The backup target must also be considered. When it comes to protecting data within an organiza- tion’s own datacenter, the backup target might be a tape drive, or perhaps a virtual tape library. However, these resources might be inadequate when it comes to protecting data residing in the cloud.
BANDWIDTH ISSUES
The primary issue with backing up cloud data to on-premises backup targets is bandwidth. If an organization is producing large quantities of data in the cloud, backing that data up to a backup target residing on-premises could deplete the organization’s avail- able Internet bandwidth.
Organizations commonly find it easiest to back up data residing in the cloud to cloud-based backup targets. IaaS providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide the ability to create
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Production Workloads USA-East Region
Backup
USA-West Region
Figure 1. Backing up to different cloud regions protects against localized disasters.
cloud-based backup targets, and these targets can accommodate backups of data residing on-premises or in the public cloud.
When evaluating public cloud-based backup targets, one of the first considerations to take into account is cost. IaaS cloud providers usually charge a monthly fee for storage con- sumed and for data transfers. In other words, subscribers are leasing the storage space that their data is consuming, but must usually pay an additional fee to upload or download data.
Another consideration is whether the target provides the required degree of protection. If your data resides within the AWS cloud, for example, does it make sense to back the data up to an AWS backup target?
Large public cloud providers group cloud resources by region. Resources residing in different regions usually exist within different datacenters. Hence, an organization that wants to back up its AWS data to the AWS cloud should place the backup in (or replicate the backup to) a different region from the data that needs to be protected, as shown in Figure 1.