Guest post by Mamush Heayie
The backup and storage landscape has changed. Network traffic patterns have been transformed. There are no predictable, point-to-point transaction activities any more. Transactions are bandwidth intense, many-to-many and demanding. Databases must be available 24 x 7 x 365, and servers cannot shut down their services day or night. Data formats have also changed. There are new data types—video files, audio files, unstructured data files and big data—that must be backed-up, stored securely, replicated, delivered or archived. There is a proliferation of server applications and user applications. Organizations striving to stabilize their networks and backup processes must remain conscious of this changing computing environment. However, they need not over provision their network infrastructure or discard existing infrastructure in favor of standardized equipment. They can turn to Cloud backup services and abstract their concerns around network traffic to their backup service vendor.
Cloud backup services take a holistic approach to network and IT services management. They promise to deliver a reliable, secure and cost efficient network / business experience to their customers over the Internet and work towards delivering on their promise in multiple ways. Data center consolidation, disaster recovery and business continuity receive focus.
Organization defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) are metrics that are considered significant. Data is backed up to local servers, local appliances, local drives, primary servers, remote servers, mirror servers, replication servers, etc. redundantly from a single unified administrative interface. The multiplicity of backups is orchestrated to ensure high availability of information to the enterprise. Plug-ins built into the Cloud backup software is application-aware and light weight to ease the management of multi-platform, multi-operating system based servers and their backup. Virtualization techniques are used to help reduce the number of servers that need to be managed. Administration systems are centralized to simplify the management of IT assets.
Layered security is enforced with “difficult to break” Cryptographic algorithms that may be third party tested and certified. The encryption key is most often user defined and user-managed to provide an additional layer of security. The data at rest remains encrypted for preventing hijack of mission-critical enterprise information. Access to information can be restricted by administrators from the central user management interface and only users with assigned rights and permissions can gain access to enterprise information. Authorized users can recover data from anywhere, anytime to any kind of hardware (Bare metal recovery).
About the Author: Mamush Heayie is Managing Editor at www.BackupReview.info – a leading informational website for the Cloud backup and data storage industry.
