This is part of Solutions Review’s Premium Content Series, a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in maturing software categories. In this submission, Bocada Chief Revenue Officer Matt Hall offers key cloud backup data protection practices to know.
Changes aren’t just coming to cloud backup. They are here. Findings from Bocada’s Backup Monitoring Trends Report show that nearly two-thirds of backup operations will move to the cloud by 2025. This shift should come as no surprise to anyone. Moving away from data centers, upfront hardware investments, and recurring maintenance represent major cost savings while providing a more flexible, scalable infrastructure.
However, this change does not eliminate the need for data protection and oversight of backup operations. belt As backup and recovery move to the cloud, IT professionals must develop strategies to secure backup health and data resiliency. Five key areas must remain top-of-mind to maintain data integrity and restorability.
Automate Daily Performance Monitoring
The day-to-day responsibilities of backup and data protection professionals do not change as infrastructures migrate to the cloud. They still need to manage daily backup performance and meet monthly backup success rates or SLA criteria. However, 46 percent of backup admins told us that it becomes more difficult as the amount of backup data grows.
Getting ahead of this data boom means implementing automated solutions to aggregate and centralize performance metrics under one pane. Without it, backup admins will rely on manual, error-prone methods to collect, normalize, and visualize performance. This is an outdated approach that takes valuable time away from managing holistic systems and addressing protection holes.
Optimize Remediation Workflows
Along the same lines, backup remediation, even in the on-prem world, used to be a very manual operation. Everything from identifying failed backups to creating tickets to exploring failure issues takes valuable time.
As organizations transition to cloud operations, they must also consider ways to optimize and streamline their cloud backup remediation workflows. This means implementing smart triggers to automatically create and auto-populate tickets as well as smart triggers to automatically close tickets based on specific criteria. Implementing it within a cloud or multi-cloud environment better centralizes ticket management and reduces the overall time between a failure event and successful remediation.
Streamline Unprotected Asset Discovery
Moving to the cloud simplifies the acquisition and operation of new IT resources, and often decentralizes the responsibility for pushing assets live. This is great for flexibility, but terrible for ensuring that key resources have proper backup protection in place.
Backup professionals should be aware of this in any cloud migration and should find streamlined strategies to identify unprotected assets. For example, consider automatically reconciling asset inventory lists, such as a CMDB from ServiceNow, with your organization’s backup job records. Any inventoried asset without a backup record likely represents an unprotected resource that requires backup protection. With a consensus list in hand, admins can jump into security implementation without first performing manual needle-in-a-haystack searches.
Develop Processes For On-Prem Legacy Backup Monitoring
We see a few of our customers with cloud environments that operate exclusively in the cloud. This is especially true for major business organizations. The huge cost associated with migrating legacy on-prem backups to the cloud and removing all hardware and software associated with on-prem backups is prohibitive at any moment.
While our customers anticipate a future state of cloud-only environments, they know it will be a slow transition away from their on-prem systems. This means that anyone moving from on-prem to cloud backup infrastructures will also need ways to continue monitoring legacy on-prem systems as well.
As important as it is to centralize cloud backup operations under a single pane, organizations will be best prepared for this hybrid monitoring if they consolidate on-prem and cloud backup performance in the same place. This allows organizations to use a generalist to manage backup health, as opposed to having multiple specialists, each skilled in a unique backup product. Additionally, with centralized visibility, backup admins can better manage problem areas and intelligently address the biggest issues impacting backup successes.
Reduce Unexpected Storage Usage Costs
One of the biggest ironies in moving to the cloud is that as hardware costs drop, you can be left with unexpected storage usage fees. This comes into play especially with snapshot scaling.
Unused or neglected snapshots quickly become orphaned snapshots. At the same time, the seemingly unlimited capacity offered by cloud backup storage means that expired snapshots are rarely purged. Combined, these unnecessary snapshots take up space and result in higher than estimated storage costs.
Backup professionals managing cloud environments will need systems in place to efficiently identify orphaned or expired resources. For example, in AWS, this would mean automating the identification of resources with a “vol-fffffff” value, a value that AWS automatically assigns to orphaned resources. In turn, having a process to quickly check the creation date, expiration date, and retention period of resources will give admins a list of expired snapshots ready for removal. By spending less time searching for these assets, admins can spend their time removing them and minimizing storage fees.
For over six years, Matt Hall has overseen Bocada’s growth and the organization’s focus on expanding data protection automation across hybrid environments and data protection operations. Matt is a strong advocate for streamlined IT workflows that efficiently protect valuable data, shield it from security risks, and enable staff to effectively monitor complex systems.