Enterprises of all sizes are radically transforming themselves. They’re moving toward fully digitized operational models. It’s having a profound effect on backup infrastructure and processes.
In the old days, backup was done once a day onto tape, which was then physically transported to an offsite facility somewhere. As a result, IT pros often measured recovery time and point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) in days. By comparison, automated cloud backup is now possible in near-real-time, across multiple sites, with RTOs and RPOs available in hours, if not minutes.
The 3-2-1-0 Model
Veeam Software is known not only for its world-class backup, recovery and data management software. It has also been a champion of the updated 3-2-1-0 backup rule. This maxim serves as a guide for IT pros through the tricky policy development phase of effective business continuity.
3-2-1-0 in a Nutshell
Three: Have 3 copies of your data (one will be the production copy)
Two: Copies should be on at least 2 different types of media (tape, cloud, disk, etc.)
One: At least 1 copy should be stored offsite, far enough away so a regional disaster won’t take it out with your data center
Zero: Optional, but this rule means you test backups to make sure you have 0 recovery failures.
The first part of the rule requires at least three copies of your data at all times. You should also use at least two different storage media, such as an internal hard disk and a tape or external drive. One copy should be housed on a physical server while the secondary should be on network attached storage (NAS) and on a different brand, size and type or storage. Finally, backups should be stored at one offsite location and at one offline facility, and backups should be verified to have zero errors.
To achieve this level of service takes more than cutting-edge technology. It requires a solid team to implement and manage the environment over the long term. CyberFortress and Veeam have had a strong partnership for quite some time. We’ve won two Veeam Innovation Awards, three Partner of the Year Awards, and Best in Show at VeeamON.
One of the most critical aspects of a fully functional backup environment is to keep it completely sealed off from production so as not to interfere with daily workflows. With Veeam SureBackup, organizations gain a number of advantages not available elsewhere. For instance, users can ping their machines to see if they’re running correctly without having to fully rehydrate the backup file.
SureBackup also supports disaster recovery (DR) testing with replicas in a powerful isolated recovery environment with a complete documentation suite. In this way, enterprises can conduct rigorous testing. OffsiteDataSync can act as a recovery expert to optimize the process.
We’ve been delivering data protection for more than 20 years on literally hundreds of thousands of physical and virtual machines (VM). We also provide compliant services to meet SOC, ISO, HIPAA and other regulations. What’s more, OffsiteDataSync and Veeam are pushing into advanced services on integrated public cloud, hybrid-cloud aware and hypervisor agnostic frameworks. The goal is to deliver high stability in highly scaled environments.
At Your Service
All of this makes for a highly effective DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) environment. By transitioning DR to a service model, organizations are able to shift backup and recovery operations from a CAPEX to an OPEX model where it can be more easily integrated into annual budgets. As well, DRaaS has been shown to provide one-click failover services to deliver aggressive recovery times.
If you found this interesting then click here to download our eBook, 3-2-1 Data Protection Blueprint: Offsite Backup, Disaster Recovery & The Cloud.
Also, if you want to learn more about how to choose a disaster recovery service provider, you should check this blog.
