A Model for Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Services

Cloud storage is a compelling business delivery model that leverages key storage and data protection services while reducing costs by shifting IT spending from a capital expense to an operating expense. One of the most interesting aspects of cloud storage for IT is how it can be leveraged for backup and disaster recovery (DR) services, where all businesses are most vulnerable and can least afford to cut back when times are tough. More and more businesses are turning to cloud storage for a more cost-effective way of meeting their data protection needs. Even in the midst of the worst slowdown in IT spending in decades, corporations continued to invest in cloud computing and virtualization this year. Gartner predicts that cloud services in general will exceed $56 billion this year, a 21 percent increase over last year, while IT spending in general decreased 5 percent.

Cloud backup and DR services are targeted at reducing the cost of infrastructure, applications and overall business processes. Cloud backup and DR must aim to make reliable data protection affordable and easy to manage for even the smallest enterprises. In addition to the large number SMBs in the U.S., about 80 percent of large enterprise sites in the U.S. are considered remote or branch offices (ROBO), with little or no storage/backup experience or on-site IT support. Cloud backup and DR makes this vital IT function available as a service to all SMBs and ROBO sites with the simplicity and precision of turning on an Internet connection – and at a reasonable cost.

There are cloud-based data backup services available today, but not all cloud backup services are created equal. What IT requires is data protection in the cloud for SMB and ROBO that goes beyond backing up the files of your laptop to providing full system disk images (as well as files) of your ERP system, your mail server, your Web server – in other words, your critical business systems. This enterprise-class cloud backup and DR can extend to larger enterprises in both public and private cloud models, and I believe this is where the greatest value can be delivered to IT organizations large and small.

The challenges to cloud storage and cloud backup and DR in particular involve mobility, information transfer to and from the cloud; availability, assuring optimal business continuity; scalability, allowing the customer to pay only for what is needed and to expand instantly as needed; data validation, ensuring the integrity of the data in the cloud at all times; security, preventing security breaches and non-authorized data access and sharing; and, of course, economics, reducing capital and operating expenses without compromising the requisite quality of service.

To meet these challenges and to be a viable cloud storage managed service provider (MSP), the MSP must build its service on the foundation of three fundamentals: a fully virtualized storage infrastructure, a scalable file system and a compelling application that responds to customers’ urgent business requirements – such as backup and DR. What I would want such a service to provide me may seem impossible, but it is merely a paradigm shift in data protection for which the time has come. The new paradigm for cloud backup and DR must include immediate verification of backed up and replicated data, must reduce workloads significantly from daily backups (365 a year) to weekly jobs, must guarantee the recovery of information and business continuity with an ironclad service level agreement (SLA), and must converge backup and replication silos into one homogeneous system that supports both disk and tape.

The ideal cloud backup and DR service, then, would provide the following key elements:

• A replica of all protected systems frequently updated by incremental backups or snapshots at intervals set by the user for each system, so the user determines the settings according to recovery point objectives.
• Full site, system, disk, and file recovery via a completely user-driven, self-service portal that allows the user the flexibility to choose which file disk or system they want to recover.
• Fast SLA-based data recovery. Recovery is, after all, what backup is all about, and there can be no compromise when choosing a cloud service for backup and DR. The SLA is negotiated up front, and the customer pays for the SLA required. No data, no file or system disk, should take more than 30 minutes to recover.
• WAN optimization between the customer site and the cloud that enables full data mobility at reduced bandwidth and storage utilization and cost.
• Data validation. There must be an automated or user-initiated validation protocol that allows the customer to check their data at any time to ensure the data’s integrity.
• DR rehearsal that demonstrates the viability of your DR plan.

In summary, the ideal cloud backup and DR model will provide customers the choice and flexibility to perform on premises or outsourced backup and DR, a reduction in capital and operational expenses, and reliable availability of IT systems for business continuity.