Backing up with the cloud: Balance your strategies

Enterprises must recognise that long term benefits can incur higher short-term costs but also ensure infrastructure-readiness for future digital breakthroughs.

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How do enterprises decide what the best approach for their data protection needs is? At an elemental level there is traditional tape backup for long term archiving. If you supplement this with cloud platforms, you now have separate options for Cloud-based backup & Disaster.

While having a backup strategy is important, it is not the same as a disaster recovery strategy; rather, the beginning stages of establishing a proper data protection plan. Backup helps to recover data currently in use that may have been corrupted or lost by maintaining a copy of your data. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, replicates your IT environment when disaster strikes by restoring services from an alternative site.

According to an independent survey conducted by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting Research, the average cost of a single hour of downtime – as reported by 98 per cent of organisations—is US$100,0001. So, when organisations consider using or adding cloud to their backup strategy, the motivating factors are usually lower cost and the convenience of outsourcing at least a large piece of the backup headache to someone else.

Some CIOs actually consider this an added, even unwanted cost as a secondary backup strategy of last resort. Yet no single backup strategy can ever be the best: having a mix of strategies integrated into a disaster recovery plan, and dynamically tweaking the balance of this mix as needs evolve, is a better option.

Here are some hard truths to ponder over:

1.   Clear skies are not cloudless: Any variety of cloud backup really may not be the godsend for every organisation. But used to protect against specific risks in certain scenarios, a cloud backup tier option is indispensable and has to form an integral part of any sustainable business continuity master plan.

2.   Be penny wise + pound wise: Evaluate the downsides carefully. Is it easier and more economical to manage your manpower-hungry and costly internal backup infrastructure or to manage Backup-as-a-service (BaaS) vendors and their service levels?

3.   Avoid paralysis by over-analysis:  Do you really expect the unique benefits of on-premise solutions at off-premises prices? If so, are you prepared to wait it out while technology churns along to reach that elusive economic sweet spot? Meanwhile in the long wait ahead, will that leave your organisation vulnerable, redundant or incompatible with your customers’ needs and expectations?

4.   You can afford it if you accord it! If it seems clear that enterprises cannot afford to totally shun the cloud for their backup and business continuity mandates, how do they balance it with other alternatives? What level of cloud reliance is not too expensive, not consequential to key data protection and business continuity priorities, and yet are pragmatic enough to be accorded as nice-to-have tiers of added protection?

5.   Going for established brands: Cloud backup tiers are not as flexible, and when trouble arises, this inflexibility can extend to how the main vendor outsources its own support infrastructure. With all this in mind, the key may to delve into the really focused, self-sufficient brand name vendors, where the premium prices incorporate intangible benefits that are not immediately apparent during budgeting planning in “fair weather”.

6.   Think long term: Consider the extra cost of integrating cloud backup to reduce long-term OPEX or total cost of ownership. A balance of cloud and in-house backup solutions offer the best long-term data protection strategy to mitigate any short-term increases in associated cloud costs by using scalable pay-as-you-go plans with customisable SLAs.

7.   Great things don’t come cheap: Aside from the critical backup process, can a vendor offer the right flexibilities for failover and recovery options for continuity? Backup and disaster recovery are critical components of a data protection plan, but if they work alone, there is no measurable guarantee that application processing can continue uninterrupted.  A well-crafted backup & disaster recovery plan that ensures your business mitigates IT interruptions is well worth the extra investment.

8.   Are data residency and sovereignty requirements provided for? Should trouble arise, are the options for rapid recovery ever cheap?

By judiciously integrating on-premise data protection with flexible cloud BaaS plans (and ideally also recovery and failover measures) that scale with business change, enterprises can leverage different platforms, additional safeguards and lower CAPEX when implemented from the outset.

Enterprises must recognise that long term benefits can incur higher short-term costs but also ensure infrastructure-readiness for future digital breakthroughs.

1http://itic-corp.com/blog/2016/08/cost-of-hourly-downtime-soars-81-of-enterprises-say-it-exceeds-300k-on-average/