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How to build and maintain a reliable backup infrastructure
A backup infrastructure is critical to long-term data protection and rapid recoveries. As environments become more complex, maintaining a strong infrastructure can be difficult.
Data recoveries are only as good as the underlying backup infrastructure, so it's critical that organizations maintain a solid framework for backups.
Administrators face various challenges when designing, implementing and maintaining backup processes. Today's hybrid on-premises and cloud-based environments require attention and careful thought.
The best way to address these challenges is with a reliable backup infrastructure that adapts to new business practices and rapidly changing technologies. The speed of these changes necessitates a robust recovery testing process that the business commits to running regularly.
An organization's backup infrastructure does not just include the technologies used to create, store and protect backups. A backup infrastructure is also made up of the methods admins employ, testing policies and schedules, and recovery objectives the infrastructure must meet.
There are several approaches backup administrators can take to bolster an organization's backup infrastructure and avoid common hurdles.
What are the challenges?
Today's backup administrators must navigate tools offered by numerous vendors, honor data sovereignty laws and provide nimble recovery services. It's up to the IT team to find the most reliable, efficient and economical way of protecting data assets.
There are several challenges backup administrators face today.
Data is arguably as decentralized as it has ever been, spread among data centers, branch offices, cloud storage, edge systems, IoT devices and more. The wide array of formats and locations creates a complex environment of data that must be protected by a backup infrastructure. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms increase the complexity of understanding where data resides.
Complicating things further, different cloud platforms, operating systems and services do not always easily interconnect. The complexity of distributed data storage and hybrid environments also increases the likelihood of single points of failure.
Another major challenge for backup admins is the threat of cyberattacks. Today, cybercriminals can target backed-up versions of data in ransomware attacks.
Data consumers expect strict adherence to recovery time requirements and service-level agreements, so a backup infrastructure must also consider recovery times and objectives.
Lastly, the primary methods of understanding and fixing these issues are strong monitoring and testing, which aren't quick and simple processes. Auditing is essential to a strong backup infrastructure, but can be challenging to achieve with busy schedules -- especially if the backup or IT teams are understaffed.
10 tips to build a better backup infrastructure
To start building a backup infrastructure, admins must begin by understanding three things:
- What types of data they must protect.
- How frequently they must back up the data.
- Where the data resides.
The challenges of data backup can be daunting. Luckily, many tools and practices exist to simplify data protection, enabling admins to build or update a reliable backup infrastructure.
The following activities might vary by organization, but all can contribute to a stronger backup infrastructure:
- Understand requirements and regulations surrounding data, especially concerning personally identifiable information and protected health information.
- Define recovery objectives suitable to the organization's needs.
- Automate backup processes where possible.
- Implement monitoring and alerting features.
- Integrate comprehensive documentation practices.
- Work with vendors to understand their offerings, weaknesses and interoperability options.
- Monitor data in transit and data at rest for ransomware, human error or system failure threats.
- Use trend analysis to predict backup needs and resource requirements in today's ever-changing environments.
- Review disaster recovery plans frequently, especially in dynamic environments with rapidly changing data storage requirements.
- Test backup and recovery procedures and media regularly.
Various other tools and practices exist to maximize a backup infrastructure's effectiveness. For example, consider data deduplication to reduce the quantity of redundant data backups that tools must copy.
Backup strategies to implement
Backup strategies are a key element of a backup infrastructure. They help establish comprehensive backups, reliable restore options and efficient operations.
Begin by understanding the three major backup types: full, incremental and differential.
The primary difference between the three is how they handle the archive bit. The archive bit records whether a file has changed, such as by a user adding content to a document. Full and incremental backups reset this bit after backing up the file, indicating that it has been backed up with all changes. Differential backups do not reset the bit, meaning they will repeatedly back up the same file, even if it has not changed since the last differential backup.
Most administrators conduct a full backup regularly with either incremental or differential backups nightly between full backups.
Generally, incremental backups complete the backup job more quickly, but could require longer to recover all information. In contrast, differential backups might take longer to complete, but the related restore process is usually quicker.
Rules to follow and build on
Modern backup plans emphasize the use of the 3-2-1 rule in backup infrastructure design. The rule helps ensure data recoverability and protection with an eye toward quick responses to issues. The 3-2-1 method involves the following:
- Three copies of data, including the original.
- Two storage media types, such as tape and storage disk.
- One copy off-site in case of an on-premises disaster.
The 3-2-1 rule is a great starting point, but many organizations extend the strategy to one of its variants. Two examples are the 3-2-1-1-0 rule and the 4-3-2 rule.
The 3-2-1-1-0 rule retains the same first three tactics as the 3-2-1 method, but goes two steps further. This method includes one air-gapped isolated copy to help mitigate ransomware threats and a zero-error requirement for reliability.
The 4-3-2 rule extends the original 3-2-1 approach by defining four data copies stored in three locations: on-premises, in the cloud and with a third-party storage repository. It also requires two copies to be stored off-site.
Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to TechTarget Editorial and CompTIA Blogs.
