Data backup and recovery are crucial components of the modern IT and storage environment. Today, the importance of data backup is increasing. Businesses of different sizes, from small to enterprises, require efficient backup technologies such as application development, SaaS, cloud solutions, and virtualization. These areas can help obtain real business value.
In this scenario, the emerging types of ransomware attacks provoke an increase in information breaches. Enterprises being attacked by ransomware try to find necessary data backups to dig out of a great financial hole. But they feel disappointed. Their backups are often incomplete or corrupted. After all, such backups can miss multiple important data pieces or even be infected by malware attacks.
Below, we will analyze the top nine data backup trends you should consider when starting your backup planning.
Data Sovereignty Clouds and Regulatory Compliance
Undoubtedly, information has become one of the most valuable business assets for numerous companies worldwide. Thus, governments should respond with increasingly strict privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Besides, in the next few years, the importance of data sovereignty clouds will increase. Such technology allows storing information within nations or within a particular physical location.
Although businesses may regard that as an obstacle, they will obtain benefits after implementation. That is because data sovereignty clouds ensure consumer privacy as the basis of business strategy. So, to remain competitive, you should consider how and where to store the critical information. To do that, you can cooperate with a cloud service vendor.
After all, the top-notch disaster recovery strategies will focus on providing data privacy and security. However, each data breach can provoke adverse outcomes, so it is crucial to prevent such events from happening.
Cyber Resilience
The emerging threats require information to become more resilient than before. Considering the increasing popularity of remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic, modern systems risk ransomware attacks and unauthorized access. Here, storage admins are the ones who play a crucial role in ensuring your information is protected appropriately.
So why are backups important? Data backup serves as the last line of cyber defense against malware attacks and other different security threats. Hackers do not only intend to access your company’s network; their goal is to corrupt the information you deal with. But if your organization has an updated data copy, you will recover quickly and effectively. In addition, it means that cybercriminals cannot harm your operations. Thus, companies can rely on cloud data recovery to bring all necessary things back online if the primary information is compromised.
Unfortunately, threat vectors are also evolving, allowing hackers to attack backup data. That creates relevant impediments during the recovery process. However, such a scenario also contributes to the appearance of advanced backup strategies and tools that will address various potential issues.
Protect Unstructured Data
Organizations have to combat ransomware, safeguard cloud data, and protect unstructured information. At the same time, they should consider fighting ransomware attacks the highest priority. The modern hybrid work deals with more corporate information outside the corporate firewall compared to previous practices.
In this case, a data backup strategy is a relevant requirement to safeguard your company’s information. Probably some companies may regard cloud backups as a challenging task. However, they have to understand the responsibility for protecting their cloud information.
Enterprises often find it hard to understand unstructured data. So, the ability to identify and classify it is essential. It is the only way to ensure security and retention levels related to data protection.
Automated Audit
Implementing a fully automated, disaster-proof cloud data backup is among the most popular data storage trends. That helps ensure constant data protection for each of your critical databases. Also, that allows for an RPO of 0, which is seamless and provided by your database technology.
Whether it is related to multi-cloud, multi-region, or simply through availability zones, your company should have an efficient cloud backup and recovery strategy. This strategy must be able to withstand the potential significant cloud outages. So, you have to provide automated testing and validate your backup systems. Also, there is no need to test individual systems manually. You can simplify the audit readiness and attestation using automated reports.
Multi-Сloud Backups
Multi-cloud approaches are becoming popular due to their significant flexibility and performance optimization provided by relevant mixing and matching services. Thus, expanding such strategies contributes to the growing demand for multi-cloud backup and recovery tools.
These tools can allow you to back up information through cloud services offered by different providers. Often, they take backed-up data from one service and keep it on another, which is one of the best disaster recovery practices. From the ideal viewpoint, such multi-cloud solutions must also ensure recovery to various providers.
So, how are these multi-cloud data backup and recovery tools constructed? Among the most widely used ways are containers and microservices. The relevant technologies allow your company to utilize workloads and information using multiple cloud environments. At the same time, you can forget about the compatibility of utilized services or proprietary formats. That is because all containers are created independently of host operating systems. Also, they contain all required dependencies.
If your organization aims to back up such assets, you should provide an image of containers. Then, you can share and deploy it through different resources if needed. Moreover, each container has the same code, and you can access them with the same API. That also allows for transferring workloads between services with no effort during outages.
Lastly, such flexibility helps businesses avoid or minimize downtime in different situations. But, of course, there is a low possibility that each cloud provider your company uses struggles with the same disaster.
Keep Some Applications On-Premises
Using policy-driven automation helps manage the ways of saving application backups in relevant off-site locations. That is crucial to recover quickly from accidental and malicious attacks such as ransomware. Moreover, you should find it critical to implement advanced protection despite the computer or data storage infrastructure.
Organizations should have enough flexibility to keep some applications and environments on-premises. Meanwhile, they have to run others using a cloud provider. For example, modern businesses can build depending on the Kubernetes and use resources through clusters and clouds effectively.
Hybrid Cloud Backups
As multi-cloud backup tools, hybrid clouds provide companies with better flexibility and control. That is why they are also growing in popularity. With the appropriate hybrid cloud backup tools, your organization can either build a hybrid cloud or support the existing one.
So, how do these solutions work? Firstly, they back up information using an on-premises appliance. After that, they duplicate an appropriate data backup to cloud resources. Such a duplication helps your company ensure that critical information is available with minimal latency. But at the same time, the scalability of storage is maintained. Multiple tools can also sync on-premise resources using the data generated in the cloud environment, allowing two-way backup.
When utilizing hybrid systems, on-site backups make it possible to recover data more quickly, despite the level of internet connection. Meanwhile, cloud copies of relevant data backups enable your company to keep older backups for more extended and create an efficient mechanism for disaster recovery. That is incredibly crucial, significantly when your on-premises resources become compromised.
Besides spreading your data backups through resources, hybrid clouds allow businesses to cut down their capital expenses. These solutions help your company off-load older backups to new cloud storage, which reduces the need to utilize on-premises resources.
Modern hybrid resources require purchasing, managing, and maintaining fewer disks. Each backup you store in the cloud environment is kept on infrastructure provided by the cloud service vendor. That transforms your capital expenses into traditional operating costs.
Thanks to a hybrid model, your business may pay down its technical debt depending on your resources. But you will still have access to all cloud advantages. In addition, it makes hybrid cloud backups an attractive option, especially for companies with established infrastructures.
Cloud-Native Backup & Disaster Recovery
Now, more and more businesses apply cloud-only environments. That makes the cloud-native backup and recovery approach crucial. Such tools are already built into relevant cloud services and traditionally offered directly by cloud vendors.
With cloud-native solutions, your organization can automate data backups easily and manage them at scale. Also, you can recover workloads and information globally with no extra effort. Such solutions are incredibly critical when it comes to cloud-native applications.
You know that traditional data backups mean individually copying information. This task is often challenging within a distributed system and may result in overlooked components. On the other hand, cloud-native tools provide the backup of disparate resources and configurations you apply in a cloud-native deployment. But you should remember two important aspects of cloud-native backups. The first is creating container images. Meanwhile, the second is the backup of supporting information and configurations.
For instance, if your company is operating stateful applications, you will not find a container image enough. That is when cloud-native backups come in handy. Unfortunately, they duplicate critical information related to databases, infrastructure settings, networking details, and associated documents, including media and codebases.
Instant Вatabase Recovery
Fortunately, it appears relatively easy to create a copy of your database. However, the ability to ensure that you can access and use the database immediately is a new “must-have” function of efficient backup and recovery tools. So, you should pay attention to the most prominent disaster recovery-as-a-service solutions. That allows for promoting innovations related to instant database recovery.
What Backup Trends to Follow?
Depending on the modern digital-first landscape, information has become the new gold. Today, you can find millions of blog articles or other content pieces that prove the importance of data. So, data-driven insights serve as the primary source for business growth that allows your company to achieve critical business goals. But when data transforms into a valuable asset, it begins to attract the attention of numerous cybercriminals. Ultimately, they can steal information from your existing digital ecosystems.
To protect the information across various complex systems efficiently, you should create the appropriate enterprise data recovery strategies. That will improve your business continuity and save thousands of dollars since you can prevent downtime and avoid malware attacks. So, do not hesitate - let’s experience the critical advantages of data backup right now!
Data backups made simple
Automated. Secure. Fast.
