One of the forgotten elements of migrating an application to the cloud is protecting that application and its data. There sometimes is an assumption that the cloud automatically protects itself and for natural disaster protection, that assumption is correct. Most cloud providers have highly resilient storage systems that can survive many simultaneous failures. Additionally, most cloud providers automatically replicate data from one cloud data center to another. The problem is that all of these protection methods are real-time; they don’t provide point in time protection to cover the organization from application corruption, user error or cyber-attack.
On-premises solutions need to protect data from both natural disasters and human-caused (application corruption, user error or cyber-attack). For the most part, cloud-native applications have protection from natural disasters built in but lack protection from humans. Data loss that comes from a human-caused event occurs gradually. A real-time process like replication will more than likely copy these corruption events as they happen, which makes these copies useless when the organization identifies the problem and seeks to replace the corrupted data.
To protect cloud-native applications from human-caused data loss requires making copies of the application and its data on a frequent basis. Each of those copies should be available for the organization to leverage in a recovery effort.
Several cloud providers count on snapshots to provide the point in time protection to protect an application from a human-caused event. The problem is most cloud-based snapshot solutions require manual integration into the cloud-native application, or the organization needs to leverage a third party software solution that puts a wrapper on cloud-based snapshots. The next step is for the cloud providers to integrate point-in-time protection events into their platform so the user can select its protection in the same way it selects replication levels today. The cloud provider could also provide an ability to protect on-premises applications as part of its service, enabling the organization to get rid of the entire data protection infrastructure.
In our on demand webinar “The Three Reasons Cloud Backup is Broken and How to Fix It” Storage Switzerland and Microsoft look at the state of cloud backup and examine how current backup solutions are protecting cloud-native, Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-premises data sets, where they are falling short and how to fix them.
Join us and receive a copy of Storage Switzerland’s white paper “Understanding Cloud Backup as a Platform”.
In this webinar, we’ll cover the three problems with cloud backup:
First, it doesn’t eliminate the on-premises infrastructure; it replaces it with a new one. Second, it doesn’t protect Hybrid IT. Solutions are often on-premises focused or cloud-focused. IT needs one integrated solution. Third, the cloud creates a problematic ROI calculation. ROI calculations usually do not factor in egress charges making determination of the true cost of a cloud backup solution very difficult.
After a careful examination of the problem, the team discusses ways to address these problems to create an infrastructure-less data protection environment. Attendees to the live webinar can ask their specific cloud backup questions directly of the panel and get expert answers immediately.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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