Mike Small: Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Why This Is an Essential Component of Digital Transformation

Like I say, this, this talk is going to cover cloud backup and disaster recovery and why this is an essential component of digital transformation. And so I'm going to cover these points in the presentation, including what is backup and disaster recovery in the debt world of the cloud, how you would choose a solution and some talk about some featured vendors.

So organizations are going through digital transformation, and I think this has become a big buzzword, but effectively it is about exploiting the opportunities that are presented by all of the technology that has emerged through vast amounts of data that and vast amounts of computing power that are available through cloud services that allow things like machine intelligence and the ability to get closer to your customers, to optimize the way that you operate and to create new products.

Now, this is absolutely fine, but the problem with this is that as you become more and more dependent upon these it services, you become more and more fragile. If there is anything that happens that interrupts them. And unfortunately, as you become more dependent, the cyber risks and simply the risks of disasters, natural disasters, and other kinds of things like this also increase. And to give an example of this, many of you will have read about the ransomware attack attack on nos. And this is a salutary lesson because nos keto is in fact, a very traditional organization making aluminium.

And so you might say, well, how is it that a ransomware attack on an aluminium smelter can cause such disruption? Well, of course, as they made their plants more and more efficient using digital technology, they became more and more at risk. If that digital technology didn't work. And indeed, the only way that they were able to recover from disaster was because the, the, the ex-employees who had retired, remembered how to work the plant without the digital technology. Now not all organizations are in that estate.

What has happened is many organizations have closed down or reduce the size of their call centers. They have become more and more dependent for their internal processes upon the it and the paper processes have gone. And so when there is some kind of an it disaster, they become paralyzed and the cost of that disaster can increase. So in order to make your digital transformation resilient, you need to have a business continuity plan, and you have some kind of dig digital disaster recovery.

And not only do you have to cover the on premises stuff, which was what disaster recovery usually used to consider, but what happens about your cloud? There are all kinds of ways that your cloud service may not provide the service that you want. But as Betal said, at the very beginning, you can outsource the delivery of this stuff, but you will not be able to outsource the responsibility for your data. And you need to be able to protect yourself against mistakes as well as malicious acts.

And the key question to ask yourself is how long would you be able to survive if this particular it application or this system that you depend upon was not working. And so in order to do that, you need to have some kind of backup plan and a recovery plan, which covers both what is running on premises and in cloud, that it includes the whole stack of data and applications, as well as recovery and restoration. Because remember, although there has much been written about security operation and recovery, the real issue is about restoration of the service, not responding to the incident.

So to remind everybody what backup and disaster recovery is, you have everything working today. And this covers quite a considerable amount of technology, servers, application, stacks, databases, and networks. And you have some backup processes which are going to take master golden images of the current working state of this. And the value of those backup images is how well you can use them. And so how long can you manage to recover without what, what, what you've got? So this is what your recovery point objective is about.

How often do you need to take some kind of a backup, then what happens is when everything goes wrong and some, or all of your it services are infin disabled, you then able to use the backup images together with some processes to restore everything back to the way that it should be. And in that restoration, you are, you, you are then able to continue your operation. And that gives you the second objective of your backup and Dr. Which is the recovery time. How long can you, does it take to do this?

And people think that it's going to be minutes, but in practice, it can be days, weeks, and months, if you have not properly prepared. So having these backup images is absolutely critical. So this is not something new.

In fact, you may have seen from me looking rather old, that I've been around and have been involved in backup and recovery for a long, long time. And so the traditional market for this was focused on how can you take a, an image of your on premises systems, usually onto exchangeable media, like tape, you then have the problem of storing that media safely. And that actually has been a, a, a significant problem. People send them around the world and they get lost. So you have to be very careful about how you encrypt that data and how you look after it.

But recently there has been a change that first of all, there has been a recognition that you need to back up cloud services. And we'll talk about that more in a moment. And that in addition to that cloud services represent a useful way of holding your Dr data, your golden master data, because they tend to have been very well run and they provide all the resilience that you might need. So this is the, the market. And what we see is that the market for traditional on-premise to physical tape is going down and that over time, the market for Dr into the cloud and for the cloud will increase.

So how do you choose a solution? And so in order to help people to choose solutions, we write documents. One of these that I wrote recently is a market compass for cloud backup and disaster recovery. And in order to help you to choose, we set out some criteria and you can see these criteria on the slide. And I evaluated a range of common products against these criteria, with the help of the vendors and the results of that you can see in the, in, in the actual report.

And these include the basic things like usability, interoperability, deployment, and security, as well as how they manage to deal with backups for on-premises infrastructure, as a service software, as a service and how well you can recover from them. And the key capabilities that we are looking at here are, what is protected? Does it cover all of these different environments? Where is the protected data held and which storage options are supported? Are they physical ones or in the cloud or both, and finally, how easy, or how difficult is it to recover?

Do, do they require you to do it yourself? Do they provide some kind of cloud service that might help you to do it, or is there in fact, a managed service involved? So when we look at the basic protection capabilities, it's very interesting because if you look at where you might support your backed up data, where you might protect it, as well as which cloud you can actually back up, do you have a choice? Is it only into the vendor's own cloud?

Obviously putting it in more than one cloud may be a way of improving your, your resilience performance is really quite important because however you are doing backup, you're talking about transferring, or even if it's only transferring to tape large amounts of data, terabytes, multiple hundreds of terabytes of data, which means that in order to get performance and in order to help with compliance, removing duplicate copies of the same data is in fact, very important.

Durability is something that people forget about how long does the vendor guarantee that your data will remain available uncorrupted. And clearly you want that to be a long time and how can you then restore that data? And if it's going into the cloud, or if it's going on to physical things, do you have any choice of the geographic location? Once again, this is an important issue from the perspective of compliance.

Clearly, if you are going to back up your critical business data, security is really important. And so you need to be able to be sure that the data is transferred securely. That means encryption. How do you protect that data when it is being stored? How do you secure it against unauthorized access and disclosure by somebody who finds it or comes across it whilst at the same time, making sure that you can get it back. It's often very useful to allow delegation of, of the organization to back up.

And this comes back to privilege that the people who can back up and restore data have extra privileges. And how do you control those privileges to make sure that they can do their job, that they can't change or P at the data, are you able to see who has done what, and to audit that things are running correctly? And how can you be sure that the way that the data is being backed up is compliant with all the regulations that you need to comply with. And so what kinds of deployments are you going to be able to protect for on-premises deployments?

There is, is it actually just covering servers? Does it include physical as well as virtual operating environments? Does it cover all the databases as well as SharePoint and applications like CRM and E R P such as SAP and Oracle, you need to be able to cover the backup of infrastructure as a service that for example, AWS will give you amazing guarantees for the availability and the durability of buckets in S three, but they don't give you any guarantee of what happens if you delete that bucket. So if that bucket is important to you and you deleted it by mistake, that's your problem.

So all of those infrastructure as a service providers give you the ability to store your data there. But if you store your data there, it's your responsibility to look after it. Software as a service gives a greater degree of in included resilience. So for example, in office 365, there is a retention of some elements that you delete. But if you clear the garbage can, then it's gotten, and there are certain public folders with email that are not included in this, this kind of thing.

So all of these things need to be properly covered by your backup and recovery process and not the least is how do you actually recover from any disruption? Is there just self-service do you have some kind of assisted recovery and does this assisted recovery simply include services or will they provide infrastructure? Because maybe one of the fastest ways to get going again is just to simply reinstate your, your whole service on some of the systems. And some vendors will offer a fully managed service. The problem usually is actually restoring the stack.

That is to say that simply getting your database back is not enough. You need the whole operational stack. And many people have forgotten how to start a data center from nothing.

You know, do you have the, the boot discs? Do you actually have everything that you need to start from a complete blackout? And is there any kind of guaranteed service level agreement with this? And there are all kinds of interesting systems because restoring several terabytes of data over a network can take a long time. So some disaster recovery vendors provide what they call amount, which is very clear, very clever. If you've done a backup of a, say, an Oracle database, they actually provide you with an access point to that backup, which looks like an Oracle database.

And so you, you don't have to actually restore the data in order to be able to continue to run, and finally making sure that you are compliant. So when we look at some of the solutions that we picked out as being really interesting, the innovation we we picked out was Arons notary, which is a blockchain based Tampa protection system that allows you to guarantee that your data in the backup hasn't been changed.

AWS cloud enjoy is a really interesting solution, which AWS is using to migrate workloads, but effectively, this allows you to make a copy of your complete workload in a way that you can very, very quickly and easily restore it into another environment. From a simple perspective of the comprehensive capabilities, some of the vendors that have been in the market for a long time, obviously stand out Convolt and very tasks amongst others. And one of the areas that there has been little attention to is to do with software as a service coverage.

And we picked out uni trend spanning backup for office 365 as being the one that seemed to have the widest coverage of SAS environments and the easiest use. So in summary, backup and disaster recovery is an essential element of digital transformation. Remember that you are responsible for your data and applications, even if it is held in the cloud. And if you lose those applications, it's going to be used, that will pay the price.

Your digital transformation will be a, a problem, not a benefit that in order to deal with these things, the market for backup and recovery is moving towards cloud-based directory, recovery as a service. And you should be looking for that as a way of covering your hybrid environment. And you need to evaluate the solutions very carefully, and we recommend you use our copy core market compass to ensure that the solution meets your requirements. So with that, I'll say thank you very much for your attention and pass over back to ber.