Backup and Disaster Recovery has always been a consideration for all customers when it comes to IT. With the evolving security landscape and the recent high-profile ransomware attacks, the ability to provide availability of data is becoming ever more important. Long gone have the days of daily backups and taking untested tapes home.
With all that in mind, having a strong data protection strategy is key to any business. Understanding how you can protect your data, where that data sits, how that data is protected and how that data can be retrieved are all important factors in building this strategy.
So, how can you protect your data?
Protection of data isn’t just backing it up, it’s making that data available. Offline backup windows are becoming non-existent, protection of that data is required 24/7 as businesses look to drive down their RPO and RTO. Using Veeam Backup and Replication, you have the ability to protect your critical workloads and data throughout normal operating hours. Veeam’s ecosystem of technology partners allows the protection engine to leverage vendor API’s to efficiently protect those workloads. This integration with market-leading vendors, allows the protection of data to occur as often as you would like, whilst minimising the impact to the production workloads Using this technology, you can develop your strategy to meet the RPO/RTO set by your business for each application. If you have a tier 1 application, which cannot suffer more than 15 minutes’ data loss, Veeam can help you meet that. If you have a tier 3 application which cannot suffer more than 4 hours’ data loss, you can tailor Veeam to meet that too.
Where can that data be located?
Although the data protection schedule is important, developing where that data sits is equally important. If part of your strategy is the protection of your primary data centre, it’s no good only having two copies of your data at that same site. Veeam have put together a 3-2-1 rule to help customers adhere to best practices. 3-2-1 equates to 3 copies of your data, 2 different media types, and 1 copy offsite. 3 copies of your data include the original data set. So this rule encourages you to have two additional backups of your original data to ensure that data can be available in event of failure. 2 different media types ensure that this data isn’t all stored on the same type of device. Having different media sets, which can all be managed by Veeam, reduces the risk of failure. 1 copy offsite provides primary site protection.
How can you get your data offsite?
Getting data offsite has always been the sticking point in historical data protection strategies. This element may have been reliant on individuals taking data offsite, or expensive storage and collection fees.
Back in 2014, Veeam released the Cloud Connect feature as part of their V8 update to Veeam Backup and Replication. This feature was a catalyst for businesses to extend their data availability strategy to Veeam partners offering Backup-as-a-Service. This model was heavily consumed by large numbers and three years on, the Veeam Cloud Connect possibilities are growing with the current iteration, Veeam Backup, and Replication V9.5
Veeam Cloud Connect allows customers to connect to cloud-based repositories to store backup data offsite. This connection is completed over the internet with no requirement for site-to-site VPN’s or any direct communications. This connection is encrypted over the internet to your service provider and secured via login credentials.
Veeam Cloud Connect allows backups to be removed off-site under the same management console as primary backups. Schedules can be created to ensure that offsite data is completed automatically, and then provide reports on the success of the job.
Concorde Cloud Solutions are offering free trials for this technology to all customers. If you’d like to learn more about how Veeam Cloud Connect can help you with your Data Protection Strategy please contact us on 03331 300600 or email enquiries@tctg.co.uk.