Most organizations have adopted cloud services to accelerate their IT modernization efforts and embrace their digital transformation, but they also should reconsider their data protection policies to keep pace with the innovation that comes with a move to the cloud.
Why is this critical? Traditional backup solutions that were built for data center or on-premises environments were designed to store and recover data within the same network or location. But this is not conducive for supporting workflows today, where organizations run cloud environments and access applications that are distributed geographically across different locations and do not always sit on the same platform.
Operating legacy backup solutions adds complexity to a company’s data protection and recovery process. For instance, virtual machines hosted on an application platform must often be backed up as well as restored on the same platform. In today’s hybrid cloud environment, they may instead need to be restored to a cloud platform such as Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3).
Legacy tape backup systems also are costly to manage and may not fulfil business requirements for cloud agility or fast restores. Data recovery can be a lengthy process and further slowed down as users wait for the availability of tapes and tape libraries. These speed issues will come to bear in the event of a major disaster, which is more likely to impact physical sites.
The cost of maintaining proprietary legacy data appliances further pushes up overheads for businesses and holds them back from being able to innovate and remain agile to compete in their market.
The traditional concept of data centers has transitioned toward hybrid clouds, where content is created on laptops and other end-user devices outside the local corporate network. Workloads constantly are moving across this extended cloud infrastructure and processed at various locations. Companies that continue deploying traditional data protection solutions for such workloads are creating unnecessary complexities, costs and risks. They also have to spend additional resources and time on manual processes and intervention.
Administrators, for instance, need to key in command lines or scripts to automate some of these processes. This can create a new set of problems when scripts fail to work properly or have to be rewritten and updated whenever the data environment changes. It also may result in noncompliance, such as unintentional violation of data sovereignty policies. This underscores the need for organizations to reassess their data protection strategy alongside their move to the cloud, in order to maintain regulatory compliance, performance and availability.
And while data that is traditionally stored in a warehouse does not deliver any value back to the business, a cloud-based backup solution offers not only significant cost savings but also the ability to choose whether data should be recovered to a data center or on the cloud platform. Organizations also can leverage historical data to extract valuable business insights and further tap cloud-native data protection capabilities that provide more flexibility and are less complex to manage than traditional backup systems.
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One organization that gets this is Anglicare Southern Queensland. The Brisbane-based nonprofit knew it needed a more robust data protection plan to better safeguard its systems against ransomware attacks, especially in a threat landscape seeing growing cyberattacks.
Anglicare, which has a 150-year history, provides various services including residential aged care, foster care and mental health assistance, supporting more than 50,000 Queenslanders each year. Delivering that level of care meant it had to protect the systems and data that facilitated this. It had to replace the organization’s legacy backup systems with a more robust, enterprise-grade solution that encompassed cloud backups.
Veeam was brought in to help with the implementation because it met Anglicare’s requirements for speed, recovery and storage flexibility. A rigorous test schedule also was critical to the migration, to ensure the organization’s data backups and restores were clean. Backups were further tested to verify their recoverability and scanned for malware.
Anglicare’s deployment included Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, with the latter playing a crucial role in safeguarding the organization’s historical data as it moved to the office productivity suite. The Veeam solution protects Office 365 data against unintentional deletion, cyberthreats and retention-policy gaps.
Anglicare’s data backups are loaded on Amazon S3, which ensures immutable backup copies and provides automated testing for secure data restore. The organization also implemented Veeam DataLabs, which allowed it to create isolated virtual labs outside its production environment so data backups can be safely scanned and tested for malware.
A DataLabs function, called On-Demand Sandbox, further tested software patches and updates before they were pushed out for deployment. These included updates for SQL, which, with a database of 1 TB, used to take Anglicare days to test. With Veeam, it took just a few hours.
Data recovery time also was slashed to minutes, down significantly from the hours or even days it previously clocked. In addition, Anglicare was able to cut its backup window by 89%, to eight hours compared with the three days previously required.
With AWS and Veeam solutions now supporting its data backup and recovery, Anglicare not only has beefed up its protection against ransomware attacks but also is assured it has immutable backups that are tested for virus-free recoverability.
