Disaster Recovery 101: Navigating Backup and Archive Infrastructure

Aging infrastructure, strained budgets, and exponential data growth create unique challenges for disaster recovery (DR) planning. When assessing your backup and archive infrastructure, you're probably balancing data governance, data sovereignty requirements, compliance requirements, and the needs of your end users. Many legacy data storage systems can create gaps in an otherwise airtight DR plan.

Today, I'm talking through how to approach infrastructure decisions for your cyber resilience posture. You have a lot of options. On-premises? Cloud services? Hot? Warm? Cold? What combination works best for your needs? Understanding the nuances can help you sharpen your strategy.

Disaster recovery challenges

1. Relying on on-premises backup and archive infrastructure

Traditionally, businesses have relied heavily on on-premises backup solutions. Robust storage systems hold critical data, often backed up to secondary storage within the same physical location. While this approach offers a sense of control, it also presents vulnerabilities.

On-premises backups are at risk of localized events like loss of power, fire, flooding, or other natural disasters. A geographically separate DR site or other far off-site backup is essential for complete protection and compliance. Without this, the organization risks losing critical data in cases of a regional outage or loss of access.

The shift to public cloud and SaaS options opened the door to more secure and reliable data backup and disaster recovery solutions. By utilizing cloud-based storage and backup services, organizations can ensure that their data is protected in multiple locations, reducing the risk of data loss due to localized disasters. Additionally, cloud-based solutions offer scalability and flexibility, allowing organizations to easily expand their storage capacity as needed.

2. Falling into the replication trap

Many businesses have established alternate data centers as a secondary backup layer. However, these sites frequently only use replication technology. This situation can result in a scenario known as the "replication trap." There is a risk that data compromised by malware is replicated to the DR site, leading to potential data loss.

Off-site, immutable backups, independent of the primary site's data, are a key component of a robust DR strategy. In cases of malware attacks or accidental data deletion by users, off-site immutable backups allow for data retrieval from a backup saved prior to the incident and reduce possible interruptions.

3. Underestimating LTO limitations

Despite being viewed as a legacy technology, tape backups continue to be used in many organizations due to their reliability and cost-effectiveness. It is common to store tapes in a separate location to diversify data storage geographically, which helps reduce the impact of local disasters on data access and enhances overall data resilience.

Off-site tape backups may increase recoverability but create challenges with recovery time objectives (RTO) because of the increased time it takes to retrieve data from a separate location and restore it using tape technology. Hardware issues can happen often and unexpectedly. Cloud-based data storage and archiving has gained popularity because of higher availability and cost savings over traditional tape backups.

The cost and time required to operate multiple data centers and meet recovery times should also be considered in the requirements for your production and DR infrastructure. Never underestimate the risk to a successful recovery when facing time-consuming tasks like physical site recovery and data restoration from tape.

4. Leaving cloud-based productivity tools vulnerable

Cloud-based collaboration and communication tools like Google Drive and Microsoft 365 are commonly used by businesses and yet are often left vulnerable to data loss. Cloud services do not provide sufficient protection and recovery options that organizations likely need.

Businesses often find that the responsibility for backing up this data falls on their own IT, as these services typically operate under a shared responsibility model that doesn't offer comprehensive backup solutions.

To ensure a reliable DR plan that includes cloud services, you should:

• Evaluate granular recovery requirements for productivity platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
• Evaluate adherence to your long-term backup retention policy keeping in mind the regulations that your business might be subject to.
• Determine if data stored in cloud platforms needs to be backed up with immutability due to cyber insurance requirements or other security policies.
• Examine best practices for comprehensive, secure data protection for shared cloud drive services and SaaS productivity tools to address the lack of built-in recovery features.
• Plan to store true backups of your SaaS data just as you would for any other data. It may seem redundant to back up cloud platforms to the public cloud, but doing so ensures that you have the right point-in-time backups you need and you can recover on your timeline-not Google or Microsoft's.

Cloud costs will need to factor into decisions for where to store your data. Cloud storage costs should be included as a non-functional requirement to make sure you can achieve your secure recovery goals without sacrificing affordability.

Best practices for cloud-based disaster recovery

Many enterprises rely on cloud-based DR solutions to ensure uninterrupted operations, protect critical data, and maintain customer trust. Unlike traditional DR methods, cloud-based solutions offer scalability, cost-effectiveness, and rapid recovery capabilities. To truly leverage the potential of these systems, it's important to be aware of some key strategies and considerations to optimize your cloud-based disaster recovery plan, ensuring resilience in the face of unexpected disruptions.

• Consider diversifying your cloud portfolio: Using the same cloud service provider for your backups as for your production data may not be necessary, as you don't need the same level of performance for backup data. You could consider a tiered recovery approach based on the criticality of your applications and data.
• Investigate existing tools for cloud compatibility: Many on-premises data protection tools like Synology or QNAP NAS devices also support cloud targets for backup storage. It's important to match the capabilities of your current backup vendors to your recovery requirements and cloud storage budgets.
• Avoid paying for storage you're not using: Carefully read the fine print when considering cloud storage costs. Hidden fees, minimum retention requirements, and complicated pricing tiers make accurate forecasting difficult and could leave you paying for unused storage just to reach certain discount tiers.
• Balance your budget with RTO and RPO targets: Using cloud data storage for production, backups, and archive can lead to some price shock as your environment scales. And moving data to lower cost storage tiers or cold storage may achieve attractive price reductions, but it often comes at the cost of recovery speed and added complexity. Look for a cloud storage provider with transparent pricing that makes it easier to plan your costs.

Finally, you should weigh your cloud-based options to evaluate platform compatibility, ongoing costs, and whether your CSP locks you in or out of specific ecosystems due to high storage costs, data transfer costs, and proprietary features.

Leveraging cloud-based backup and archive infrastructure

Adopting cloud-based disaster recovery best practices is a key consideration for building a resilient and reliable business infrastructure. By developing a well-structured disaster recovery plan, determining the right mix of storage solutions, and optimizing costs with tiered recovery, businesses can minimize downtime and data loss during unexpected events. A proactive approach not only safeguards your organization's operations but also strengthens customer trust and competitive advantage. In a world where disruptions are inevitable, being prepared is the key to bouncing back stronger and faster.

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