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When protecting resources in an infrastructure cloud, it’s a good idea to have a backup in a separate region from the protected resources.
While this approach should theoretically pro- vide a level of separation that will allow the organization to recover from a large-scale disaster, it’s not entirely inconceivable that a cloud provider could experience a global outage that impacts multiple datacenters.
AWS? AZURE? WHY NOT BOTH?
Depending on the type of data being pro- tected, it might make sense to back up the data to a different provider’s cloud, as shown in Figure 2. For instance, AWS subscribers might want to consider backing their data up to Azure, or vice versa.
Sometimes there are advantages to backing up IaaS cloud data to a competing provider’s cloud. Not only would backing the data up to a separate cloud provide complete physical and logical separation between the primary data and the backup copy, but it might also help to ensure business continuity in the event that a cloud services provider suffers a major outage.
Suppose for a moment that a catastrophic event were to occur, and one of the major public cloud providers suffers the perma- nent loss of an entire datacenter (remember the recent AWS S3 disaster). In that type of situation, some subscribers will have inevita- bly designed their workloads to fail over to a different region.
But there will also be organizations that didn’t want to spend the money for cross-region
redundancy, and those organizations would have to scramble to bring their resources online in a different region. This might involve restoring a backup, activating offline replica virtual machines (VMs), or perhaps even manually recreating cloud-based VMs. In any case, there is no guarantee that the remaining datacenters would be able to fully absorb the workloads from the datacenter that was destroyed by the disaster.
With this in mind, the benefit of having a backup hosted on a different provider’s cloud is flexibility. If the organization’s primary cloud pro- vider has adequate capacity in its remaining datacenters, then the backup can easily be restored, and the workloads can be brought back online.
THE BENEFIT OF HAVING A BACKUP HOSTED ON A DIFFERENT PROVIDER’S CLOUD IS FLEXIBILITY.
If, on the other hand, the provider begins running out of capacity, it might be possible to restore the backups to the competing cloud platform. Given the differences between the various cloud platforms, it may not be possible to restore entire VMs; but in a pinch it should be possible to restore the content of the VMs to newly created VMs.
IAAS VS. SAAS BACKUPS
Protecting data residing within an IaaS cloud really isn’t all that differ- ent from protecting data that exists on-premises. Both environments use VMs, and somewhat similar backup techniques can be applied. However, careful consideration must be given to cost and to the overall protection strategy. Conversely, protecting SaaS data often proves to be far more difficult, as adequate backup solutions may not always exist.
Brien Posey is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and written and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health-care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country’s largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. You can visit his personal Web site at brienposey.com.
Cloud Provider 1
Production Workload
Cloud Provider 2
Backup
Figure 2. Backing up to separate public cloud providers can provide an extra level of protection.
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