An effective Disaster Recovery plan based on solid and secure backup storage is essential for good Business Continuity. In the event of system failure, computer attack, or any other problem with the infrastructure of organizations, a good backup plan is the first piece of a more complex mosaic of actions.
With backup operations, there is a tendency to create a copy as recent as possible of corporate data, data, and information which, in fact, increasingly represent the true value of organizations. From this copy of the data, it will start again to restore normal conditions by restoring systems and data on servers, virtual machines, and individual endpoints.
Full and fast storage backup
How backup storage is carried out and maintained is, therefore, essential for the success of disaster recovery. Everything must be oriented toward security and simultaneously towards speed; in fact, the first assumption of security is necessary to guarantee the integrity of the data, while that of speed is strategic to guarantee response times as fast as possible to a crisis condition.
GDPR and backup storage
Then there are strategic and regulatory aspects involving backup storage issues: conserving strategic data outside the company perimeter deserves the proper consideration. The same is necessary for managing data in compliance with the GDPR.
On-premise, cloud, or hybrid storage backup
Organizations envisage a rather broad and diversified scenario of options which can be summarized in three categories: on-premise backup, hybrid storage backup, and cloud storage backup. The various types have intrinsic strengths and weaknesses that must be weighed in the choice: backup storage in the cloud offers the advantage to organizations of maintaining a high control over costs while delegating strategic aspects such as security to the service provider. An on-premise solution allows greater control over the data but also requires internal skills within the organization and high investments to build the infrastructure. A hybrid storage backup represents an equilibrium condition, with resources based partly on-premise and partly in the cloud. However, the latter option requires infrastructure and skills – with the relatively necessary investments – certainly not minimal.
The advantages of cloud storage backup
Choosing a cloud backup storage has indisputable economic advantages, and there are encouraging data on the security front as well. The providers of these services have the possibility of making investments that are much higher than what the single organization could do: for the supplier, it is its core business; to this is added the possibility of using AI solutions applied to big data to face any security threats (Microsoft – February 2020).
New backup storage needs in the emerging widespread remote working scenario
With the increase in remote working collaborators, backup storage strategies should be reviewed. In a remote working scenario, the hardware resources used by collaborators are geographically outside the organization’s perimeter and are therefore exposed to potential risks and vulnerabilities that require appropriate solutions for their protection. In a similar scenario, data storage in the cloud could be an exciting choice: remote working devices do not store data locally. Instead, they extensively use cloud technologies to access the data and subsequent storage. In these conditions, the backup storage strategy is also more effective: it deals marginally with the devices used by collaborators, while it can focus on the cloud infrastructure where the data is stored. Many collaborators can therefore refer to a single cloud service, a service on which the investments to implement valid backup storage can also be concentrated.
Cloud storage backup at the service of the Disaster Recovery plan
The use of a cloud storage backup solution also makes the Disaster Recovery process faster and more accessible, within which it is possible to plan a series of strategic and pre-configurable operations. In case of problems, the data contained in the backup storage could be made available through virtual instances also managed in the cloud, with the possibility of already preparing these virtual machines in advance. In this way, when needed, you will already have a virtual infrastructure available and preconfigured.
Regarding speed, a further advantage is that the backup storage resides geographically in the same site where the virtual machines envisaged in the disaster recovery plan will be started.
The role of backup storage
It is a question of framing the backup storage process as an element of a broader data conservation and protection strategy, in which organizations need to identify reliable partners capable of managing the multiple aspects. A good partner will also be able to make skills and tools available to organizations that would otherwise be inaccessible for budgetary reasons and with predefined costs.
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