IDC research paper says that 90% of organizations are planning to utilize the cloud for backup and DR.
In my customer conversations, cloud backup and DR use case comes up 100% of the time. They want to protect their on-premises workloads to a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, for the reasons below:
- Reduce Storage Costs: Reduce backup storage at primary and DR data centers by backing up to S3 compatible cloud object storage in AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM. It costs less and grows on-demand.
- Reduce DR Costs: Eliminate DR infrastructure that’s running 24×7 but being used only once / twice a year. Instead, perform on-demand DR in the cloud, which reduces costs by up to 80%.
- Reduce Ops Burden: Provisioning cloud storage for backup and compute for DR is all API driven that a good backup software handles automatically.
- Accelerate Testing: Dev/QA/Security teams want copies of production data for testing. In the cloud, they can reuse backups to provision on-demand copies and compute for testing.
- Accelerate Analytics: Organizations, with ETL needs, want to leverage on-demand cloud analytics such as Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift by extracting data from their backups.
Considering these benefits, it’s crucial for backup & cloud architects to evaluate a cloud backup and DR solution based on some critical criteria or checklist. Following are just a few critical capabilities to consider:
- Does the solution allow you to use your own cloud account to store backups for peace of mind and compliance reasons?
- Does it deliver flexible RPO such as 15 minutes for critical databases, and 4 to 24 hours for the rest of the workloads?
- Does it have the ‘option’ to eliminate on-premises backup storage costs by backing up directly from on-premises to the cloud object storage?
- What is the RTO to recover from cloud object storage? Does it have the ability to convert VMware, Hyper-v, physical servers to cloud-native VMs in AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM?
- Is the software available as a SaaS subscription pricing model so organizations can pay-as-you-go?
This free e-book lists many more critical capabilities to consider. It takes away the stress while evaluating various solutions for cloud backup and DR.