Data is a company's most important asset. Protecting it must be a top priority when deploying cloud technologies
Modern organisations, regardless of their area of operation, now recognise that data is one of their most valuable assets. At the same time, in an era of significant growth in cyber-attacks and increasing dependence of business processes on access to data, data security is also a growing issue.
More sophisticated approaches
IT services are nowadays operated by companies in different modes. Whether on their own infrastructure in their own server room or in a data centre. If a company decides to use its own solution, it procures, manages and maintains it from its own resources. Subsequent operation is then carried out by in-house IT experts or by an external partner.
In the case of public cloud storage, the company uses the capacity of an external service provider. The data is located outside the company's premises and the data centre operator takes care of management, hardware or security. From a financial point of view, this form is therefore often more advantageous for companies.
Finding the most suitable solution is much more difficult today than it used to be. Indeed, with the proliferation of modern cloud solutions, more sophisticated approaches are needed to meet the ever-evolving data and platform needs of the modern organisation. It is for these reasons that one of the most popular solutions is the so-called hybrid cloud, which combines the benefits of both forms and is used by thousands of organizations.
In this way, a certain part of a company's infrastructure runs on its own cloud and hardware, and the rest in the public cloud. However, both parts are integrated in a single system, which results in a flexible environment. This allows the organisation to scale either traditional or cloud storage as required.
Deposit as insurance
According to eGroup Solutions, hybrid cloud is the path to cloud adoption, agility, efficiency and security for businesses. It provides many of the benefits of the modern cloud - flexibility, managed services, as well as cost savings, while also providing the benefits of on-premises IT infrastructure components that are often closely related to an organization's most sensitive data, or data that is created before it is processed.
The integration of a well-designed backup system is a key element for ensuring data protection in the new cloud architecture. Businesses that have moved to a cloud architecture should consider the benefits of hybrid cloud and invest in a reliable backup solution for their important data in the cloud.
A very important part of data security, apart from regular backups, is resilience to data loss and outages or fast data recovery after any disaster. Ensuring reliable and efficient backup procedures in a hybrid cloud is not just a security insurance policy, it becomes a strategic step to maintain business continuity. The best way to manage and protect data in a hybrid cloud is to select and leverage a unique data backup solution.
At a time when cyber threats are on the rise, ransomware attacks are a serious threat. Fast and efficient backups allow a business to bypass the ransom demands of cybercriminals and recover data from secure backup storage.
Most cloud providers provide various solutions for this purpose. The most common is some form of so-called replication, i.e. mirroring data within the data centre to an independent infrastructure, from local storage to the cloud or to completely different geographic areas. This offers greater protection against a single site disaster in which data storage becomes unavailable or data is lost completely. However, addressing data resiliency alone through replication is not a sufficient solution to fully protect data.
Automation and orchestration
Data loss resilience attempts to ensure that data is up-to-date and not deleted or lost. It is also necessary that it can be recovered in a very short time even without the user even noticing.
Some causes, such as accidentally cutting cables when digging up infrastructure, cannot be completely eliminated, but can be designed so that the IT service continues to run in a back-up manner. Planned downtime, for example when upgrading systems, cannot be ruled out either. In all other cases, according to eGroup Solutions, once an outage has occurred, the consequences can be quickly remedied as they are under control and, together with rapid data recovery, the required continuity can be achieved.
Getting closer to zero system downtime is made possible by a concept called Zero Downtime from eGroup Solutions, a platinum partner of IBM Slovakia. The IT environments it operates, not only those in the cloud, are always under the control of the Zero Downtime Center - a tool with modules to support IT management.
A single solution for everything
Experts advise companies to choose solutions for all scenarios. After all, one product means one vendor, one set of configuration problems or one set of training. It's also ideal if the solution can run on multiple platforms - on-premises, cloud-based or in different variants.
It is ideal to choose a vendor-neutral strategy from the start and build your backup strategy from the beginning to match multiple cloud providers. This is because it won't need to be modified.
Data that starts in AWS should be able to flow to Microsoft Azure or Google or IBM Cloud without modification, and the backup solution should easily adapt to the location of the data without the company having to worry about format changes. When backing up, a business should also be able to back up all of its data without special steps for each storage variation.
The solution uses several open-source technologies to provide its core functionality, along with IBM software components licensed under an Embedded Solution Agreement (ESA), which allows IBM software to be used as part of partners' own ESA solutions.
This solution is an indispensable part of the backup solution. This is because each company has many information systems for different processes, each of which backs up data at different times and frequencies. Therefore, the more complex the hybrid cloud, the more complex the backup strategy should be. An effective backup strategy must itself be flexible to support the evolving business and should not be a limiting factor.
Data backup is a sophisticated topic, so even a selected partner that can guarantee data disaster recovery should have sufficient experience in this regard. After all, most data changes over time. It is therefore essential that the strategy covers all data types and formats. The chosen solution must accommodate different backup approaches, rather than forcing all the disparate data into one specific, and therefore inflexible, form.
A key component of a solid backup strategy is flexibility. Without automation, however, it would be extremely limiting. This is because backup and restore preparation in a hybrid cloud is a complex process. With automation, it is completed without intervention, and at the end of the process, the user receives a report on its outcome.
Added to automation is orchestration, which takes all the automated processes, each doing individual things, and combines and manages them within a complex organization. In this way, it is possible to achieve a smoother running organisation than ever before.
Source: TREND (Read the Article)
If you want to know more, write to us at the email address sales@egroup.sk