Today’s enterprise needs a more efficient data backup strategy to mitigate the risks of failures. Storage has become increasingly cheaper and more resilient. But still, there are many challenges a backup or IT administrator needs to worry about.
Here some of the key challenges
- Number of resources to backup. Now even small organization have many applications or even 100s of applications
- Ransomware is becoming a big threat. They need an aggressive backup and recovery strategy
- Policy based backup retention
- Ability to do periodic restore drill to ensure backup is recoverable
Resource identification
Not all resources need the same level of protection. Identify the critical resource for the backup. The solution should give you a view of the protection status of your whole environment.
More frequent backups
Running daily backups is no more sufficient due to ransomware. To minimize or have no data loss more aggressive backup strategy is required
“Cybersecurity firm Cybersecurity Ventures has predicted that, globally, businesses in 2021 will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, down from every 14 seconds in 2019.”
Organizations should leverage snapshot/block-level backups. These backups are stress-free, fast, and incremental. They can have more frequent backups.
Snapshots are read-only copies and cannot be corrupted. They provide instant recovery when needed and data is made available in minutes, not in hours.
Multi Account Strategy
Similar to the offsite data center in on-premise, use a multi-account strategy in the cloud. One account can act as a secondary data center. Use the second account to recover the data if the primary account is hacked. This account act as a vault to archive backups.
Backup Retention
It is not feasible to keep backups forever due to the cost of keeping backups. Backup solutions offer retention schedules, such as keeping hourly and daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month, and monthly backups for a few months or even years. This allows to have more recent backups available for instant recovery.
Good business backup practices include retaining specific backups, such as monthly or bi-annual, for as long as possible, if not forever based on the industry compliance requirement.
Restores
Typically restore requirements are restoring a single file, application or a disk from a backup. When there is a requirement to restore large number of machines the solution should allow the environment to be recovered in scale.
About Nimesa
Nimesa is an enterprise-class Application Aware data protection, cost management & copy data management solution for applications running on AWS. It uses native AWS capabilities like EBS snapshots capabilities to automatically protect the environment. Nimesa provides simple policy-based lifecycle management of snapshots and clones of EC2 instances.