TADeals: How do I back up in the cloud?

What is it BaaS

Among the most popular concepts in today's enterprise automation environment, cloud computing and the concept of data management occupy a leading position. Data backup attracts close attention and is being actively improved. Redundancy in a public cloud environment becomes a complete alternative to traditional site redundancy. Technological trends, as you know, sooner or later form into product and service offers, and at this stage services of category BaaS appear. They are designed to ensure that enterprise data is backed up in the provider's public cloud environment and, if necessary, restored back to its original location on the customer's site.

How does it work

It is generally accepted that BaaS belongs to a very extensive and well-established category of so-called Managed Services. They involve, along with technology services, the active participation of the supplier in optimizing the performance of the customer's business and IT tasks. Typically, the service provider hosts an application in the cloud, provides hardware components directly for data storage, and, if necessary, provides a data link of the required quality and performance. Thus, according to a pre-agreed procedure, well-defined data from certain customer storage devices is transferred (usually in encrypted form) to the service provider's cloud and stored on its media. According to a similar algorithm, the reverse recovery process can be carried out.

In fact BaaS as a commercial service, it has existed for more than ten years, but for a long time the functionality of these services was limited exclusively to backing up files. And then not all, but only user and in certain formats.

Now, improved cloud, cheaper storage, faster communication links, and, finally, more functional software are talking about a much wider range of lower-priced services. Companies offering BaaS services in the world already number more than a thousand.

Important features BaaS

Backup of data and applications in the cloud has several nuances, which experts advise to pay attention to:

• BaaS services work with a variety of data sources. Among them are both classic Exchange, SQL, SAP, Oracle, and rarely used MongoDB, Hadoop, OpenStack, PostgreSQL. They are also able to "pick up" data directly during streaming (Data Streaming), although the practical demand for this is not yet very high.
• As the maturity of offerings increases, it becomes possible to back up not only the customer's internal IT systems, but also the most popular cloud services. Support for backup of desktops, laptops and all kinds of client mobile devices through various protocols is also becoming a regular feature of BaaS tools.
• Working through the web interface and implementing the known self-service concept turns into an integral element of BaaS services. With the increasing popularity of remote work, the relevance of this increases.

Why Backup in the Cloud

Backup allows you to recover information from a copy in the event of human error or failure. The popularity of cloud backup has been boosted by a growing number of companies that use public, hybrid, or private clouds to grow their businesses. This growth will obviously continue in the face of a pandemic and new risks to information security. According to a survey conducted by CrocCloud Services, among 200 organizations, 70% of them have ever turned to the cloud. Together with the basic hosting service, such clients in most cases use the backup service.

There is another cloud backup scenario: many organizations working with on premise systems back them up in the cloud. The main advantage of this model is the reduction of costs for backup infrastructure, primarily in terms of hardware solutions and administrative costs. On average, the CapEx in such projects is reduced by 30%. In addition, this creates an alienable copy of the data (stored outside the customer's data center).

Шаблон:Quote 'author = Sergey Zinkevich, Director of Services Development "Krok Cloud Services"

How Backup Helps Counter Cyber Threats

Over the past few months, cyber bullies have noticeably intensified. According to Valarm, the number of attacks on web applications has increased 2-3 times. In addition, the number of incidents related to. encryption viruses computer Laboratory of forensic science Group-IB believes that the interest of attackers shifted from individuals to corporate segment.

During the pandemic, several of our clients ran into cipherers. It was possible to minimize the consequences of attacks by quickly detecting and neutralizing, virus as well as quickly restoring data from backups, "says Sergey Zinkevich. - Probably, even after the pandemic, the relevance of cloud protection will not come to naught. Therefore, we are now focusing on those products that, other things being equal technical opportunities, allow us to ensure a higher level of information security. Most attacks are associated with Windows systems. If the entire infrastructure, including the backup service, is built on this, OS there is a risk of irretrievable loss of all data. We recommend using a backup system for, Linux for example, Veritas NetBackup. In addition to being based on a platform unpopular with attackers, NetBackup uses built-in ransomware protection against ransomware blackmailers.

How do I select a vendor BaaS

The backup market in Russia, as well as around the world, is quite mature and highly competitive. More than ten global vendors offer their products and about 15 large providers provide cloud backup services.

{{quote 'The degree of service penetration is very high - judging by Krok cloud projects, at least 80% of customers use backup systems in addition to basic infrastructure services such as IaaS and PaaS, "explains Sergey Zinkevich, Director of Service Development at Krok Cloud Services. - For obvious reasons, redundancy is more in demand in a large corporate segment: banks and other financial organizations, retail, industry and the public sector. The cost of error and the cost of data loss here is very high, so companies are ready to invest in the backup infrastructure. }}

There are two important points to consider when selecting a BaaS service provider. The first is what exactly is used as the core of the system and how suitable this product is for client tasks. The second is how professional the cloud provider team is and what the technical characteristics of the cloud platform are. Copies can be placed in object storage, an example of which is S3 in the Krok Cloud, identical to the S3 AWS service. Ideally, the object store should be "stretched" into several data centers. In this case, the backup data will be duplicated at several sites, thus providing the maximum level of fault tolerance.

How do I choose a backup technology?

Largely due to the popularity of BaaS systems in a large corporate segment, the functionality of such services is increasing. In most cases, towards IT security, but not just.

BaaS is increasingly expanding to the functionality of DRaaS (Data Recovery as a Service), effectively covering the overwhelming number of critical methodological developments related to disaster tolerance and business continuity.

In the conditions of a variety of cloud services the experts consider useful to separate BaaS from cloud services, similar in functions, - first of all from cloud storage, the systems of file synchronization (filer sync and share - FSS) and data archives (data archiving).

Now the listed additional functions for the most part are ahead of the future. The ability to back up a variety of enterprise system data remains the most sought-after BaaS feature.

For a marketplace based on leased infrastructure in the data center, we provide backup of physical servers, virtual machines, domain controllers, file resources. The total data volume is approximately 25 TB. Additionally, the data is "discounted" to the tape library, - cites the example of Sergey Zinkevich.

What are the features of Veritas NetBackup

One highly reliable BaaS solution is Veritas NetBackup. The success of backup recovery is confirmed by many years of operational experience, including among cloud providers. The solution is supported and used by all global cloud service providers: Amazon Web Services, Azure, Alibaba Cloud.

In addition to versatility, NetBackup has a special software architecture that can replace several individual IT elements, including hardware. For example, SHD with the ability to deduplicate, since this feature is already included in the product. It reduces the size of stored copies in the cloud or, in other words, reduces the cost of cloud services. According to experts, "CROC Cloudy services, on average, savings reach 40%, which is very attractive in the context of a crisis and the collapse of IT budgets.

In 2020, we revised our backup portfolio to focus on those that will benefit our customers most and will be as versatile as possible. This decision was NetBackup. We were the first in the Russian market to offer this subscription solution, "comments Sergey Zinkevich. - The solution is suitable for virtually any infrastructure and any service and is offered to all customers regardless of the specifics of their activities.

How to start using backup in the cloud

Technically, the cloud backup is quite simple to implement. To do this, agents that directly backup data are installed inside virtual machines (in the case of a local infrastructure - physical servers). The client can deploy such an infrastructure on his own or with the help of external specialists - in this case, we are talking about the format of a managed service. The duration of the project depends on the number of systems and their complexity. But on average, it does not exceed one day.