🥊 🦀 🤳🏿 Backup: where, how and why? 👨🏽‍⚖️ 💆 🙀

Data protection requires a backup - backups from which you can restore them. For most companies and organizations, backing up data is one of the most important priorities. About half of the companies work with their data as a strategic asset. And the value of stored data is constantly growing. They are used to improve the quality of customer service, support current activities, research and development, accounting, they are involved in automation systems, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, etc. Therefore, the task of protecting data from hardware failures, human errors, viruses and cyberattacks becomes extremely urgent.

The world has seen an increase in cybercrime. Last year, more than 70% of companies suffered cyber attacks. Compromising personal data of clients and confidential files can have serious consequences and lead to huge losses.

At the same time, there is a culture of working with data, an understanding that data is a valuable resource with which a company can earn additional profit or reduce costs, and with it a desire to ensure reliable protection of its data.

There are several backup options: local or remote storage of backup copies on your own site, cloud storage or backups from hosting providers.

Store and protect

According to the survey results, about a quarter of respondents back up data monthly, the same amount weekly, and more than a quarter daily. And this is quite justified: as a result of such forethought, almost 70% of organizations avoided downtime last year due to data loss. In this they are helped by improving software tools and services.

According to IDC research on the global market for Data Replication and Protection software, its worldwide sales will grow from 2018 to 2022 annually by 4.7% and reach $ 8.7 billion. Analysts at DecisionDatabases.com in their report ( Global Data Backup Software Market Growth 2019-2024) came to the conclusion that in the next five years, the average annual growth rate of the global data backup software market will be 7.6%, and in 2024 its volume will reach $ 2.456 billion compared to $ 1.836 billion in 2019.

In October 2019, Gartner introduced the Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery software for IT systems. Leading vendors of this software are Commvault, Veeam, Veritas, Dell EMC and IBM.

At the same time, cloud backup is growing in popularity: sales of such products and services are projected to grow more than twice as fast as the data protection software market as a whole. According to Gartner, this year up to 20% of enterprises will use backup to the cloud.

According to Marketintellica forecasts, the global software market for creating and storing backups on its premises and off-site will grow stably in the near future.

According to IKS Consulting, in Russia, the cloud backup as a service (BaaS) segment is growing at an average rate of 20% per year . According to the Acronis 2019 survey , companies are increasingly relying on cloud backups: more than 48% of respondents use it, and about 27% prefer to combine cloud and local backups.

Backup System Requirements

Meanwhile, data backup and recovery software requirements are changing. To successfully solve data protection problems and optimize costs, companies are ready to purchase simpler, more flexible and inexpensive solutions, according to Gartner analysts. The usual data protection methods do not always meet the new requirements.

Backup and recovery systems should provide for simple deployment and administration, convenient management of the backup and recovery process, and fast data recovery. Modern solutions often implement data replication functions, allow you to automate operations, provide for integration with clouds, built-in archiving functions, support hardware data snapshots.

According to Gartner, in the next two years, up to 40% of companies will switch to new backup solutions, replacing existing software, and many will use several products or services at the same time that optimally protect certain systems. Why are they not satisfied with previous backup and data recovery solutions?

All in one

Analysts believe that as a result of such a transition, companies get more flexible, scalable, simple and productive systems, often representing unified software for data management and storage. Advanced backup and recovery products include tools for effective data management, make it possible to move data to the place where it is stored most efficiently (including automatically), manage it, protect and restore it.

With the increasing diversity and volume of data, comprehensive protection and data management: files, databases, data from virtual and cloud environments, applications, as well as access to various types of data in primary, secondary and cloud storages becomes an important requirement.

Comprehensive data management solutions provide unified data management across the entire IT infrastructure: backing up, restoring, archiving and managing snapshots. However, administrators must clearly understand where, for how long, and what data is stored, what policies apply to them. Fast recovery of applications, virtual machines and workloads from a local or cloud data storage minimizes downtime, and automation minimizes human error.

Large organizations with a combination of legacy, traditional and modern applications often choose backup systems that support a wide range of operating systems, applications, hypervisors and relational databases, which are highly scalable (up to several petabytes and thousands of clients), and also provide integration with a wide range of systems storage of data, public, private and hybrid clouds and tape drives.

Typically, these are platforms with a traditional three-tier architecture of agents, media servers and a management server. They can combine the functions of backup and recovery, archiving, disaster recovery (DR) and cloud backup, optimize performance using algorithms of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

According to Forrester, centralized management of data sources, policies, reliable data recovery and security are the most important characteristics of backup solutions.

Modern solutions can back up virtual machines based on snapshots at any frequency with virtually no loss in productivity. They bridge the gap between the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the recovery target Objective (RTO), guarantee data availability at any time and ensure business continuity.

Data growth

Meanwhile, the world continues to grow exponentially in the amount of data created, and this trend will continue in the coming years. According to IDC's forecast, the volume of data generated per year will increase from 2018 to 2025 from 33 to 175 ZB. The average annual growth rate will exceed 27%. This increase is also affected by the increase in the number of Internet users. Last year, 53% of the world's population used the Internet. The number of Internet users is increasing annually by 15-20%. New and developing technologies, such as 5G, UHD video, analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, AR / VR, entail the generation of increasingly large amounts of data. Entertainment sources and video from cameras of video surveillance systems are also sources of data growth. For example, the market for storing video from surveillance cameras, according to MarketsandMarkets forecasts, will grow by 22,4% per year and this year will reach $ 18.28 billion.

Exponential growth in the volume of data created.

Over the past two to three years, corporate data has grown by about an order of magnitude. Accordingly, the backup task has become more complicated. Data warehouse capacities reach hundreds of terabytes and continue to increase as data accumulates. The loss of even part of this data can affect not only business processes, but also affect the brand reputation or customer loyalty. Therefore, the creation and storage of backups greatly affects the entire business.

It’s not easy to navigate the offers of vendors offering their own backup options. There are various options for creating and storing backups, but the most popular are local systems for backup and use of cloud services. Backup to the cloud or to the provider's data center provides reliable data protection and minimizes the risks associated with software failures, technical equipment malfunctions and employee errors.

Cloud migration

Data can be accumulated and stored in its own data processing centers, but at the same time it will be necessary to ensure fault tolerance, clustering and capacity scaling, to have qualified specialists in storage systems administration. Under these conditions, outsourcing all such issues to the provider is very relevant. For example, when placing databases in the provider's data center or in the cloud, it is possible to assign responsibility for the storage, data backup, and functioning of the databases to professionals. The provider will be financially responsible for the service level agreement. Among other things, this allows you to quickly deploy a typical configuration to solve a specific task, as well as provide a high degree of accessibility due to the reservation of computing resources and backup.

In 2019, the global cloud backup market volume amounted to $ 1834.3 million, and it is expected that by the end of 2026 it will reach $ 4229.3 million with an average annual growth of 12.5%.

Moreover, more and more data will be stored not in corporate networks and not on end devices, but in the cloud, and, according to IDC, the share of data in public clouds will increase to 42% by 2025. Moreover, organizations are moving towards multi-cloud infrastructures and hybrid clouds. Already 90% of European companies adhere to this approach.

Cloud backup is a data backup strategy that involves sending a copy of the data over the network to a server outside your own site. Usually this is the server of the service provider, which charges the client based on the allocated capacity, bandwidth or number of users.

The widespread adoption of cloud technology and the need to manage large amounts of data contribute to the growing popularity of cloud backup solutions. In addition, the introduction of cloud-based backup solutions is associated with advantages such as simple management and monitoring, real-time backup and recovery, easy integration of cloud backup with other corporate applications, data deduplication and support for various clients.

Key players in this market are analysts Acronis, Asigra, Barracuda Networks, Carbonite, Code42 Software, Datto, Druva Software, Efolder, IBM, Iron Mountain and Microsoft.

Multi-cloud environments

Storage vendors are doing their best to ensure that their products work efficiently in a multi-cloud environment. The task is to simplify the use of data and move it to where it is needed, and their storage is most effective. For example, they use next-generation distributed file systems that support a single namespace, providing access to data in different cloud environments, and offer common management strategies and policies in different clouds and at the local level. The ultimate goal is to manage, protect and efficiently use data wherever it is.

Monitoring is another of the challenges of multi-cloud storage. We need monitoring tools to track results in a multi-cloud environment. An independent monitoring tool designed for several clouds will give you the big picture.

Growth forecast for the global market for multi-cloud management systems.

Combining peripheral and multi-cloud storage is also a daunting task. For these systems to work effectively together, you need to know the volumes and types of data, where and how these data will be collected, transmitted and stored. To plan the process, you will also need to know how long each type of data should be stored, where, when and how much data will need to be transferred between different systems and cloud platforms, how they are backed up and protected.

All this will help administrators minimize the complexity associated with combining peripheral and multi-cloud storage.

Peripheral data

Another trend is peripheral computing. According to Gartner analysts, in the coming years, about half of all corporate data will be processed outside the traditional data centers or the cloud: their increasingly significant share is located on the periphery - for storage and local analytics. According to IDC, in the EMEA region, the share of “peripheral” data will almost double - from 11% to 21% of the total. The reasons are the spread of the Internet of things, the transfer of analytics and data processing closer to their source.

Peripheral infrastructure - data centers of various sizes and form factors - offer ample opportunities for processing and storing data and provide low latency. In this regard, changes are outlined in the proportion of the volumes of data placed in the core of the network / data center, on its periphery and on the end devices.

The transition from cloud and central computing to peripheral computing has already begun. Such systems are becoming increasingly popular. The cost and complexity of creating a centralized architecture for processing a large amount of data is excessively high, such a system can become poorly managed compared to the distribution of data processing on the periphery or at the corresponding network level. In addition, on the periphery, you can combine or depersonalize data before sending it to the cloud.

Data abroad

Some companies prefer to store data abroad, considering this option reliable data protection against unauthorized access and an important factor in reducing risk. Data abroad is a guarantee of the protection of valuable information. Equipment located abroad is not under Russian jurisdiction. And thanks to encryption, data center employees may not have access to your data at all. In modern foreign data centers, highly reliable equipment is used, high reliability indicators are provided at the level of the data center as a whole.

Using foreign data centers can have a number of other advantages. The client is insured against risks associated with force majeure or unfair competition. The use of such sites for data storage and processing will minimize such risks. For example, if servers are seized in Russia, the company will be able to save a copy of its systems and data in foreign data centers.

As a rule, the IT infrastructure of foreign data centers is the quality standards, a high level of security and control of data storage. They use the latest IT solutions, firewalls, encryption technologies for communication channels, and means of protection against DDoS attacks. The power supply of the data center is also implemented with a high level of reliability (up to TIER III and IV).

Backup in foreign data centersrelevant for any business in the Russian Federation that does not work with users' personal data, the storage and processing of which, in accordance with Law No. 152- On Personal Data, should be carried out in Russia. These requirements can be met by deploying two sites: the main one in Russia, where primary data processing takes place, and the foreign one, where backups are located.

Foreign sites are often used as a backup data center. This ensures maximum safety and reliability, minimizes risks. In some cases, they are convenient for placing data and connecting European customers to them. This achieves the best response time for European users. Such data centers have direct access to European traffic exchange points. For example, we offer 4 data hosting points in Europe are immediately available to their customers - these are Zurich (Switzerland), Frankfurt (Germany), London (Great Britain) and Amsterdam (Netherlands).

What to consider when choosing a data center?

Using the services of commercial data centers, in addition to a convenient cost structure, a business receives a more flexible service that can be scaled in real time, and only consumed resources are paid (pay-per-use). External data center services can also reduce risks associated with the uncertainty of the future, easily adapt IT to new technological trends, focus on its key business processes, and not on maintaining IT infrastructure.

During the construction and operation of their sites, providers take into account best practices and international standards that place high demands on data center engineering and IT systems, such as ISO 27001: 2013 Information Security Management, ISO 50001: 2011 Energy Management System (effective planning energy supply systems of the data center), ISO 22301: 2012 Business Continuity Management System (ensuring the continuity of business processes of the data center), as well as European standards EN 50600-x, the PCI DSS standard regarding the security of processing and storage of plastic card data of international payment systems.

As a result, the customer receives a fault-tolerant service providing reliable reliable data storage and business process continuity.

Backup: where, how and why?