7 Key Things to Consider Before Purchasing Cloud-Native Data Protection Solutions
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As organizations increasingly migrate their workloads to the cloud, the need for robust and cloud-native data protection solutions has become paramount. These solutions are designed to operate in the cloud environment, providing various benefits such as scalability, flexibility, reduced costs, enhanced security, simplified management, and rapid recovery. However, choosing the right one for your organization can be challenging with the wide range of available cloud-native data protection solutions. This blog explores key considerations before investing in a cloud-native data protection solution. Let’s get started!
Key Considerations for Cloud-Native Data Protection Solutions
Let’s delve into the essential six requirements for cloud-native data protection solutions.
1. Multi-Tenancy and Self-Service
Key Consideration
Seek a solution that seamlessly integrates with your cloud infrastructure, supporting tenant-driven workflows.
Reason
In a cloud environment, multiple tenants often deploy and manage their applications independently. A cloud-native data protection solution should natively integrate with the cloud’s identity management mechanisms, allowing tenants autonomy over their backup and recovery operations. 1 This self-service approach empowers users to set their own data protection policies, perform backups, and restore data without relying on a centralized backup administrator. By eliminating this bottleneck, tenants can quickly meet their Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) without burdening the cloud administration team.
2. Point-in-Time Workload Recovery
Key Consideration
Seek a solution capable of capturing non-disruptive, point-in-time snapshots of entire workloads.
Reason
Cloud environments are inherently more complex than on-premises infrastructure, with multiple interconnected components such as computing resources, network configurations, and data storage. A cloud-native data protection solution should capture comprehensive, application-consistent snapshots of complete workloads, including metadata related to security groups, network settings, VM flavors, and storage configurations. This ensures that tenants can quickly restore their entire workload to a specific point in time in the event of an incident, minimizing the risk of data loss and the time required for recovery.
3. Policy-Based Backup and Retention
Key Consideration
Look for a solution empowering backup administrators to schedule backups and establish tailored policies for individual workloads, volumes, or tenants.
Reason
Cloud-native data protection solutions should allow administrators to define backup and retention policies tailored to specific workloads, volumes, or tenants. 1 This policy-driven approach allows for automated, scheduled backups that adhere to organizational requirements without manual intervention. As the number of snapshots reaches the specified retention limits, the oldest snapshots are automatically deleted, ensuring efficient use of storage resources.
4. Application Consistency
Key Consideration
Seek a solution capable of capturing application-consistent snapshots, which will ensure recovery to a precise point in time without any data loss.
Reason
A cloud-native data protection solution should capture application-consistent snapshots to ensure successful recovery with no data loss. These snapshots are taken when the application has been notified and allowed to flush its memory, ensuring that the data is consistent and can be restored to a specific point. This approach eliminates the risk of reverting to older, potentially inconsistent backups, potentially leading to data loss or corruption.
5. Integrated Management
Key Consideration
Look for a solution seamlessly integrated into your current cloud management dashboard or accessible through a command-line interface.
Reason
Cloud-native data protection solutions should seamlessly integrate with the existing cloud management interfaces, whether web-based dashboard or a command-line interface. 1 This integration allows administrators and end-users to access backup and recovery controls directly from the tools they already use for cloud management. By providing a unified view of cloud operations and data protection, this requirement enhances the organization’s visibility, control, and chargeback/showback capabilities.
6. Incremental-Forever Backups
Key Consideration
Seek a solution harnessing incremental-forever backup technology to facilitate lightweight, frequent snapshots of your cloud environments.
Reason
Traditional backup approaches often require periodic full backups, which can be resource-intensive and disruptive to cloud operations. Cloud-native data protection solutions should leverage incremental-forever backup technology, where an initial full backup is taken, and all subsequent backups are incremental. 1 This approach enables more frequent, lightweight snapshots without the overhead associated with full backups. When restoring a workload, the cloud-native solution can synthesize a full backup image from the incremental snapshots, providing a complete and consistent recovery.
7. Scalability
Key Consideration
A scalable solution that meets your growing cloud infrastructure needs.
Reason
Cloud architectures offer unparalleled agility and flexibility compared to traditional data centers. However, integrating legacy systems onto these architectures often leads to administrative complexities and ongoing maintenance burdens. Legacy data protection solutions rely on manual agent deployment and device addition for each new resource, resulting in a cumbersome configuration process compounded by system changes and failures. In contrast, cloud-native solutions seamlessly scale alongside the cloud itself. Utilizing both a control plane and a data plane, these solutions horizontally scale and deploy with high availability clusters to eliminate single points of failure. Each compute node autonomously handles backup and recovery tasks for VMs running on it, aligning with the cloud’s efficient VM placement algorithm. This ensures scalability mirroring the cloud’s growth, with the control plane independently scalable based on VM count and unaffected by backup data volume. This scalability grants users complete freedom to expand as needed.
Conclusion
By meeting these seven essential criteria, cloud-native data protection solutions offer organizations a robust and streamlined approach to securing their cloud-based operations. Seamlessly integrating into cloud infrastructures, these solutions empower users with self-service functionalities and guarantee swift recovery in case of data loss or system disruptions. As businesses increasingly embrace the agility and scalability of the cloud, MSys Technologies stands ready to assist in implementing a cloud-native data protection strategy integral to their broader cloud management and resilience initiatives. Reach out to us here for further information.