All posts by Kari Rivas

Cloud Storage Performance: The Metrics that Matter

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-performance-the-metrics-that-matter/

A decorative image showing a cloud in the foreground and various mocked up graphs in the background.

Availability, time to first byte, throughput, durability—there are plenty of ways to measure “performance” when it comes to cloud storage. But, which measure is best and how should performance factor in when you’re choosing a cloud storage provider? Other than security and cost, performance is arguably the most important decision criteria, but it’s also the hardest dimension to clarify. It can be highly variable and depends on your own infrastructure, your workload, and all the network connections between your infrastructure and the cloud provider as well.

Today, I’m walking through how to think strategically about cloud storage performance, including which metrics matter and which may not be as important for you.

First, What’s Your Use Case?

The first thing to keep in mind is how you’re going to be using cloud storage. After all, performance requirements will vary from one use case to another. For instance, you may need greater performance in terms of latency if you’re using cloud storage to serve up software as a service (SaaS) content; however, if you’re using cloud storage to back up and archive data, throughput is probably more important for your purposes.

For something like application storage, you should also have other tools in your toolbox even when you are using hot, fast, public cloud storage, like the ability to cache content on edge servers, closer to end users, with a content delivery network (CDN).

Ultimately, you need to decide which cloud storage metrics are the most important to your organization. Performance is important, certainly, but security or cost may be weighted more heavily in your decision matrix.

A decorative image showing several icons representing different types of files on a grid over a cloud.

What Is Performant Cloud Storage?

Performance can be described using a number of different criteria, including:

  • Latency
  • Throughput
  • Availability
  • Durability

I’ll define each of these and talk a bit about what each means when you’re evaluating a given cloud storage provider and how they may affect upload and download speeds.

Latency

  • Latency is defined as the time between a client request and a server response. It quantifies the time it takes data to transfer across a network.  
  • Latency is primarily influenced by physical distance—the farther away the client is from the server, the longer it takes to complete the request. 
  • If you’re serving content to many geographically dispersed clients, you can use a CDN to reduce the latency they experience. 

Latency can be influenced by network congestion, security protocols on a network, or network infrastructure, but the primary cause is generally distance, as we noted above. 

Downstream latency is typically measured using time to first byte (TTFB). In the context of surfing the web, TTFB is the time between a page request and when the browser receives the first byte of information from the server. In other words, TTFB is measured by how long it takes between the start of the request and the start of the response, including DNS lookup and establishing the connection using a TCP handshake and TLS handshake if you’ve made the request over HTTPS.

Let’s say you’re uploading data from California to a cloud storage data center in Sacramento. In that case, you’ll experience lower latency than if your business data is stored in, say, Ohio and has to make the cross-country trip. However, making the “right” decision about where to store your data isn’t quite as simple as that, and the complexity goes back to your use case. If you’re using cloud storage for off-site backup, you may want your data to be stored farther away from your organization to protect against natural disasters. In this case, performance is likely secondary to location—you only need fast enough performance to meet your backup schedule. 

Using a CDN to Improve Latency

If you’re using cloud storage to store active data, you can speed up performance by using a CDN. A CDN helps speed content delivery by caching content at the edge, meaning faster load times and reduced latency. 

Edge networks create “satellite servers” that are separate from your central data server, and CDNs leverage these to chart the fastest data delivery path to end users. 

Throughput

  • Throughput is a measure of the amount of data passing through a system at a given time.
  • If you have spare bandwidth, you can use multi-threading to improve throughput. 
  • Cloud storage providers’ architecture influences throughput, as do their policies around slowdowns (i.e. throttling).

Throughput is often confused with bandwidth. The two concepts are closely related, but different. 

To explain them, it’s helpful to use a metaphor: Imagine a swimming pool. The amount of water in it is your file size. When you want to drain the pool, you need a pipe. Bandwidth is the size of the pipe, and throughput is the rate at which water moves through the pipe successfully. So, bandwidth affects your ultimate throughput. Throughput is also influenced by processing power, packet loss, and network topology, but bandwidth is the main factor. 

A diagram showing the pipe metaphor that describes the differences between bandwidth and throughput.
Source.

Using Multi-Threading to Improve Throughput

Assuming you have some bandwidth to spare, one of the best ways to improve throughput is to enable multi-threading. Threads are units of execution within processes. When you transmit files using a program across a network, they are being communicated by threads. Using more than one thread (multi-threading) to transmit files is, not surprisingly, better and faster than using just one (although a greater number of threads will require more processing power and memory). To return to our water pipe analogy, multi-threading is like having multiple water pumps (threads) running to that same pipe. Maybe with one pump, you can only fill 10% of your pipe. But you can keep adding pumps until you reach pipe capacity.

When you’re using cloud storage with an integration like backup software or a network attached storage (NAS) device, the multi-threading setting is typically found in the integration’s settings. Many backup tools, like Veeam, are already set to multi-thread by default. Veeam automatically makes adjustments based on details like the number of individual backup jobs, or you can configure the number of threads manually. Other integrations, like Synology’s Cloud Sync, also give you granular control over threading so you can dial in your performance.  

A diagram showing single vs. multi-threaded processes.
Still confused about threads? Learn more in our deep dive, including what’s going on in this diagram.

That said, the gains from increasing the number of threads are limited by the available bandwidth, processing power, and memory. Finding the right setting can involve some trial and error, but the improvements can be substantial (as we discovered when we compared download speeds on different Python versions using single vs. multi-threading).

What About Throttling?

One question you’ll absolutely want to ask when you’re choosing a cloud storage provider is whether they throttle traffic. That means they deliberately slow down your connection for various reasons. Shameless plug here: Backblaze does not throttle, so customers are able to take advantage of all their bandwidth while uploading to B2 Cloud Storage. Amazon and many other public cloud services do throttle.

Upload Speed and Download Speed

Your ultimate upload and download speeds will be affected by throughput and latency. Again, it’s important to consider your use case when determining which performance measure is most important for you. Latency is important to application storage use cases where things like how fast a website loads can make or break a potential SaaS customer. With latency being primarily influenced by distance, it can be further optimized with the help of a CDN. Throughput is often the measurement that’s more important to backup and archive customers because it is indicative of the upload and download speeds an end user will experience, and it can be influenced by cloud storage provider practices, like throttling.   

Availability

  • Availability is the percentage of time a cloud service or a resource is functioning correctly.
  • Make sure the availability listed in the cloud provider’s service level agreement (SLA) matches your needs. 
  • Keep in mind the difference between hot and cold storage—cold storage services like Amazon Glacier offer slower retrieval and response times.

Also called uptime, this metric measures the percentage of time that a cloud service or resource is available and functioning correctly. It’s usually expressed as a percentage, with 99.9% (three nines) or 99.99% (four nines) availability being common targets for critical services. Availability is often backed by SLAs that define the uptime customers can expect and what happens if availability falls below that metric. 

You’ll also want to consider availability if you’re considering whether you want to store in cold storage versus hot storage. Cold storage is lower performing by design. It prioritizes durability and cost-effectiveness over availability. Services like Amazon Glacier and Google Coldline take this approach, offering slower retrieval and response times than their hot storage counterparts. While cost savings is typically a big factor when it comes to considering cold storage, keep in mind that if you do need to retrieve your data, it will take much longer (potentially days instead of seconds), and speeding that up at all is still going to cost you. You may end up paying more to get your data back faster, and you should also be aware of the exorbitant egress fees and minimum storage duration requirements for cold storage—unexpected costs that can easily add up. 

Cold Hot
Access Speed Slow Fast
Access Frequency Seldom or Never Frequent
Data Volume Low High
Storage Media Slower drives, LTO, offline Faster drives, durable drives, SSDs
Cost Lower Higher

Durability

  • Durability is the ability of a storage system to consistently preserve data.
  • Durability is measured in “nines” or the probability that your data is retrievable after one year of storage. 
  • We designed the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud for 11 nines of durability using erasure coding.

Data durability refers to the ability of a data storage system to reliably and consistently preserve data over time, even in the face of hardware failures, errors, or unforeseen issues. It is a measure of data’s long-term resilience and permanence. Highly durable data storage systems ensure that data remains intact and accessible, meeting reliability and availability expectations, making it a fundamental consideration for critical applications and data management.

We usually measure durability or, more precisely annual durability, in “nines”, referring to the number of nines in the probability (expressed as a percentage) that your data is retrievable after one year of storage. We know from our work on Drive Stats that an annual failure rate of 1% is typical for a hard drive. So, if you were to store your data on a single drive, its durability, the probability that it would not fail, would be 99%, or two nines.

The very simplest way of improving durability is to simply replicate data across multiple drives. If a file is lost, you still have the remaining copies. It’s also simple to calculate the durability with this approach. If you write each file to two drives, you lose data only if both drives fail. We calculate the probability of both drives failing by multiplying the probabilities of either drive failing, 0.01 x 0.01 = 0.0001, giving a durability of 99.99%, or four nines. While simple, this approach is costly—it incurs a 100% overhead in the amount of storage required to deliver four nines of durability.

Erasure coding is a more sophisticated technique, improving durability with much less overhead than simple replication. An erasure code takes a “message,” such as a data file, and makes a longer message in a way that the original can be reconstructed from the longer message even if parts of the longer message have been lost. 

A decorative image showing the matrices that get multiplied to allow Reed-Solomon code to re-create files.
A representation of Reed-Solomon erasure coding, with some very cool Storage Pods in the background.

The durability calculation for this approach is much more complex than for replication, as it involves the time required to replace and rebuild failed drives as well as the probability that a drive will fail, but we calculated that we could take advantage of erasure coding in designing the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud for 11 nines of durability with just 25% overhead in the amount of storage required. 

How does this work? Briefly, when we store a file, we split it into 16 equal-sized pieces, or shards. We then calculate four more shards, called parity shards, in such a way that the original file can be reconstructed from any 16 of the 20 shards. We then store the resulting 20 shards on 20 different drives, each in a separate Storage Pod (storage server).

Note: As hard disk drive capacity increases, so does the time required to recover after a drive failure, so we periodically adjust the ratio between data shards and parity shards to maintain our eleven nines durability target. Consequently, our very newest vaults use a 15+5 scheme.

If a drive does fail, it can be replaced with a new drive, and its data rebuilt from the remaining good drives. We open sourced our implementation of Reed-Solomon erasure coding, so you can dive into the source code for more details.

Additional Factors Impacting Cloud Storage Performance

In addition to bandwidth and latency, there are a few additional factors that impact cloud storage performance, including:

  • The size of your files.
  • The number of files you upload or download.
  • Block (part) size.
  • The amount of available memory on your machine. 

Small files—that is, those less than 5GB—can be uploaded in a single API call. Larger files, from 5MB to 10TB, can be uploaded as “parts”, in multiple API calls. You’ll notice that there is quite an overlap here! For uploading files between 5MB and 5GB, is it better to upload them in a single API call, or split them into parts? What is the optimum part size? For backup applications, which typically split all data into equal-sized blocks, storing each block as a file, what is the optimum block size? As with many questions, the answer is that it depends.

Remember latency? Each API call incurs a more-or-less fixed overhead due to latency. For a 1GB file, assuming a single thread of execution, uploading all 1GB in a single API call will be faster than ten API calls each uploading a 100MB part, since those additional nine API calls each incur some latency overhead. So, bigger is better, right?

Not necessarily. Multi-threading, as mentioned above, affords us the opportunity to upload multiple parts simultaneously, which improves performance—but there are trade-offs. Typically, each part must be stored in memory as it is uploaded, so more threads means more memory consumption. If the number of threads multiplied by the part size exceeds available memory, then either the application will fail with an out of memory error, or data will be swapped to disk, reducing performance.

Downloading data offers even more flexibility, since applications can specify any portion of the file to download in each API call. Whether uploading or downloading, there is a maximum number of threads that will drive throughput to consume all of the available bandwidth. Exceeding this maximum will consume more memory, but provide no performance benefit. If you go back to our pipe analogy, you’ll have reached the maximum capacity of the pipe, so adding more pumps won’t make things move faster. 

So, what to do to get the best performance possible for your use case? Simple: customize your settings. 

Most backup and file transfer tools allow you to configure the number of threads and the amount of data to be transferred per API call, whether that’s block size or part size. If you are writing your own application, you should allow for these parameters to be configured. When it comes to deployment, some experimentation may be required to achieve maximum throughput given available memory.

How to Evaluate Cloud Performance

To sum up, the cloud is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of every company’s tech stack. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform. So, cloud storage performance will likely be a consideration for your company in the next few years if it isn’t already.

It’s important to consider that cloud storage performance can be highly subjective and heavily influenced by things like use case considerations (i.e. backup and archive versus application storage, media workflow, or another), end user bandwidth and throughput, file size, block size, etc. Any evaluation of cloud performance should take these factors into account rather than simply relying on metrics in isolation. And, a holistic cloud strategy will likely have multiple operational schemas to optimize resources for different use cases.

Wait, Aren’t You, Backblaze, a Cloud Storage Company?

Why, yes. Thank you for noticing. We ARE a cloud storage company, and we OFTEN get questions about all of the topics above. In fact, that’s why we put this guide together—our customers and prospects are the best sources of content ideas we can think of. Circling back to the beginning, it bears repeating that performance is one factor to consider in addition to security and cost. (And, hey, we would be remiss not to mention that we’re also one-fifth the cost of AWS S3.) Ultimately, whether you choose Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage or not though, we hope the information is useful to you. Let us know if there’s anything we missed.

The post Cloud Storage Performance: The Metrics that Matter appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Seven Reasons Your Backup Strategy Might Be Failing You

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/seven-reasons-your-backup-strategy-might-be-failing-you/

A decorative image showing a cloud with a backup symbol, then three circles with 3, 2, and 1. There are question marks behind the cloud.

Are you confident that your backup strategy has you covered? If not, it’s time to confront the reality that your backup strategy might not be as strong as you think. And even if you’re feeling great about it, it can never hurt to poke holes in your strategy to see where you need to shore up your defenses.

Whether you’re a small business owner wearing many hats (including the responsibility for backing up your company’s data) or a seasoned IT professional, you know that protecting your data is a top priority. The industry standard is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which states you should have three copies of your data on two different kinds of media with at least one copy off-site or in the cloud. But a lot has changed since that standard was introduced. 

In this post, we’ll identify several ways your 3-2-1 strategy (and your backups in general) could fail. These are common mistakes that even professional IT teams can make. While 3-2-1 is a great place to start, especially if you’re not currently following that approach, it can now be considered table stakes. 

For larger businesses or any business wanting to fail proof its backups, read on to learn how you can plug the gaps in your 3-2-1 strategy and better secure your data from ransomware and other disasters.

Join the Webinar

There’s more to learn about how to shore up your data protection strategy. Join Backblaze on Thursday, August 10 at 10 a.m. PT/noon CT/5 p.m. UTC for a 30-minute webinar on “10 Common Data Protection Mistakes.”

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Let’s start with a quick review of the 3-2-1 strategy.

The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different media, and at least one off-site copy or in the cloud. For instance, a business may keep a local copy of its data on a server at the main office, a second copy of its data on a NAS device in the same location, and a third copy of its data in the public cloud, such as Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. Hence, there are three copies of its data with two local copies on different media (the server and NAS) and one copy stored off-site in the cloud.

A diagram showing a 3-2-1 backup strategy, in which there are three copies of data, in two different locations, with one location off-site.

The 3-2-1 rule originated in 2005 when Peter Krogh, a photographer, writer, and consultant, introduced it in his book, “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers.” As this rule was developed almost 20 years ago, you can imagine that it may be outdated in some regards. Consider that 2005 was the year YouTube was founded. Let’s face it, a lot has changed since 2005, and today the 3-2-1 strategy is just the starting point. In fact, even if you’re faithfully following the 3-2-1 rule, there may still be some gaps in your data protection strategy.

While backups to external hard drives, tape, and other recordable media (CDs, DVDs, and SD cards) were common two decades ago, those modalities are now considered legacy storage. The public cloud was a relatively new innovation in 2005, so, at first, 3-2-1 did not even consider the possibilities of cloud storage. 

Arguably, the entire concept of “media” in 3-2-1 (as in having two local copies of your data on two different kinds of media) may not make sense in today’s modern IT environment. And, while an on-premises copy of your data typically offers the fastest Recovery Time Objective (RTO), having two local copies of your data will not protect against the multitude of potential natural disasters like fire, floods, tornados, and earthquakes. 

The “2” part of the 3-2-1 equation may make sense for consumers and sole proprietors (e.g., photographers, graphic designers, etc.) who are prone to hardware failure and for whom having a second copy of data on a NAS device or external hard drive is an easy solution, but enterprises have more complex infrastructures. 

Enterprises may be better served by having more than one off-site copy, in case of an on-premises data disaster. This can be easily automated with a cloud replication tool which allows you to store your data in different regions. (Backblaze offers Cloud Replication for this purpose.) Replicating your data across regions provides geographical separation from your production environment and added redundancy. The bottom line is that 3-2-1 is a good starting point for configuring your backup strategy, but it should not be taken as a one-size-fits-all approach.

The 3-2-1-1-0 Strategy

Some companies in the data protection space, like Veeam, have updated 3-2-1 with the 3-2-1-1-0 approach. This particular definition stipulates that you:

  • Maintain at least three copies of business data.
  • Store data on at least two different types of storage media.
  • Keep one copy of the backups in an off-site location.
  • Keep one copy of the media offline or air gapped.
  • Ensure all recoverability solutions have zero errors.
A diagram showing the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy.

The 3-2-1-1-0 approach addresses two important weaknesses of 3-2-1. First, 3-2-1 doesn’t address the prevalence of ransomware. Even if you follow 3-2-1 with fidelity, your data could still be vulnerable to a ransomware attack. The 3-2-1-1-0 rule covers this by requiring one copy to be offline or air gapped. With Object Lock, your data can be made immutable, which is considered a virtual air gap, thus fulfilling the 3-2-1-1-0 rule. 

Second, 3-2-1 does not consider disaster recovery (DR) needs. While backups are one part of your disaster recovery plan, your DR plan needs to consider many more factors. The “0” in 3-2-1-1-0 captures an important aspect of DR planning, which is that you must test your backups and ensure you can recover from them without error. Ultimately, you should architect your backup strategy to support your DR plan and the potential need for a recovery, rather than trying to abide by any particular backup rule.

Additional Gaps in Your Backup Strategy

As you can tell by now, there are many shades of gray when it comes to 3-2-1, and these varying interpretations can create areas of weakness in a business’ data protection plan. Review your own plan for the following seven common mistakes and close the gaps in your strategy by implementing the suggested best practices.

1. Using Sync Functionality Instead of Backing Up

You may be following 3-2-1, but if copies of your data are stored on a sync service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, you’re not fully protected. Syncing your data does not allow you to recover from previous versions with the level of granularity that a backup offers.

Best Practice: Instead, ensure you have three copies of your data protected by true backup functionality.

2. Counting Production Data as a Backup

Some interpret the production data to be one of the three copies of data or one of the two different media types.

Best Practice: It’s open to interpretation, but you may want to consider having three copies of data in addition to your production data for the best protection.

3. Using a Storage Appliance That’s Vulnerable to Ransomware

Many on-premises storage systems now support immutability, so it’s a good time to reevaluate your local storage. 

Best Practice: New features in popular backup software like Veeam even enable NAS devices to be protected from ransomware. Learn more about Veeam support for NAS immutability and how to orchestrate end-to-end immutability for impenetrable backups.

4. Not Backing Up Your SaaS Data

It’s a mistake to think your Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other software as a service (SaaS) data is protected because it’s already hosted in the cloud. SaaS providers operate under a “shared responsibility model,” meaning they may not back up your data as often as you’d like or provide effective means to recovery. 

Best Practice: Be sure to back up your SaaS data to the cloud to ensure complete coverage of the 3-2-1 rule. 

5. Relying On Off-Site Legacy Storage

It’s always a good idea to have at least one copy of your data on-site for the fastest RTO. But if you’re relying on legacy storage, like tape, to fulfill the off-site requirement of the 3-2-1 strategy, you probably know how expensive and time-consuming it can be. And sometimes that expense and timesuck means your off-site backups are not updated as often as they should be, which leads to mistakes. 

Best Practice: Replace your off-site storage with cloud storage to modernize your architecture and prevent gaps in your backups. Backblaze B2 is one-fifth of the cost of AWS, so it’s easily affordable to migrate off tape and other legacy storage systems.

6. No Plan for Affected Infrastructure

Faithfully following 3-2-1 will get you nowhere if you don’t have the infrastructure to restore your backups. If your infrastructure is destroyed or disrupted, you need a way to ensure business continuity in the face of data disaster.

Best Practice: Be sure your disaster recovery plan outlines how you will access your DR documentation and implement the plan even if your environment is down. Using a tool like Cloud Instant Business Recovery (Cloud IBR), which offers an on-demand, automated solution that allows Veeam users to stand up bare metal servers in the cloud, allows you to immediately begin recovering data while rebuilding infrastructure.

7. Keeping Your Off-Site Copy Down the Street

The 3-2-1 policy states that one copy of your data be kept off-site, and some companies maintain a DR site for that exact purpose. However, if your DR facility is in the same local area as your main office, you have a big gap in your data protection strategy. 

Best Practice: Ideally, you should have an off-site copy of your data stored in a public cloud data center far from your data production site, to protect against regional natural disasters.

Telco Adopts Cloud for Geographic Separation

AcenTek’s existing storage scheme covered the 3-2-1 basics, but their off-site copy was no further away than their own data center. In the case of a large natural disaster, their one off-site copy could be vulnerable to destruction, leaving them without a path to recovery. With Backblaze B2, AcenTek has an additional layer of resilience for its backup data by storing it in a secure, immutable cloud storage platform across the country from their headquarters in Minnesota.

Read the Full Story ➔ 

Modernize Your Backup Strategy

The 3-2-1 strategy is a great starting point for small businesses that need to develop a backup plan, but larger mid-market and enterprise organizations must think about business continuity more holistically. 

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage makes it easy to modernize your backup strategy by sending data backups and archives straight to the cloud—without the expense and complexity of many public cloud services.

At one-fifth of the price of AWS, Backblaze B2 is an affordable, time-saving alternative to the hyperscalers, LTO, and traditional DR sites. Get started today or contact Sales for more information on Backblaze B2 Reserve, Backblaze’s all-inclusive capacity-based pricing that includes premium support and no egress fees. The intricacies of operations, data management, and potential risks demand a more advanced approach to ensure uninterrupted operations. By leveraging cloud storage, you can create a robust, cost-effective, and flexible backup strategy that you can easily customize to your business needs.

Interested in learning more about backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery best practices? Check out the free Backblaze resources below.

The post Seven Reasons Your Backup Strategy Might Be Failing You appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Secure Your SaaS Tools: Back Up Microsoft 365 to the Cloud

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/secure-your-saas-tools-back-up-microsoft-365-to-the-cloud/

A decorative image showing a computer backing up programs to a cloud with a Microsoft logo on one side, and on the other side, data to a cloud with the Backblaze logo.

Have you ever had that nagging feeling that you are forgetting something important? It’s like when you were back in school and sat down to take a test, only to realize you studied the wrong material. Worrying about your business data can feel like that. Are you fully protected? Are you doing all you can to ensure your data is backed up, safe, and easily restorable?

If you aren’t backing up your Microsoft 365 data, you could be leaving yourself unprepared and exposed. It’s a common misconception that data stored in software as a service (SaaS) products like Microsoft 365 is already backed up because it’s in a cloud application. But, anyone who’s tried to restore an entire company’s Microsoft 365 instance can tell you that’s not the case. 

In this post, you’ll get a better understanding of how your Microsoft 365 data is stored and how to back it up so you can reliably and quickly restore it should you ever need to. 

What Is Microsoft 365?

More than one million companies worldwide use Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based productivity platform that includes a suite of popular applications like Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, OneDrive, Publisher, SharePoint, and others.

Chances are that if you’re using Microsoft 365, you use it daily for all your business operations and rely heavily on the information stored within the cloud. But have you ever checked out the backup policies in Microsoft 365? 

If you are not backing up your Microsoft 365 data, you have a gap in your backup strategy which may put your business at risk. If you suffer a malware or ransomware attack, natural disaster, or even accidental deletion by an employee, you could lose that data. In addition, it may cost you a lot of time and money trying to restore from Microsoft after a data emergency.

Why You Need to Back Up M365

You might assume that, because it’s in the cloud, your SaaS data is backed up automatically for you. In reality, SaaS companies and products like Microsoft 365 operate on a shared responsibility model, meaning they back up the data and infrastructure to maintain uptime, not to help you in the event you need to restore. Practically speaking, that means that they may not back up your data as often as you would like or archive it for as long as you need. Microsoft does not concern itself with fully protecting your files. Most importantly, they may not offer a timely recovery option if you lose the data, which is critical to getting your business back online in the event of an outage. 

The bottom line is that Microsoft’s top priority is to keep its own services running. They replicate data and have redundancy safeguards in place to ensure you can access your data through the platform reliably, but they do not assume responsibility for their users’ data. 

All this to say, you are ultimately responsible for backing up your data and files in Microsoft 365.

M365 Native Backup Tools

But wait—what about Microsoft 365’s native backup tools? If you are relying on native backup support for your crucial business data, let’s talk about why that may not be the best way to make sure your data is protected.

Retention Period and Storage Costs

First, there are default settings within Microsoft 365 that dictate how long items are retained in the Recycle Bin and Deleted Items folders. You can tweak those settings for a longer retention period, but there is also a storage limit, so you might run out of space quickly. To keep your data longer, you must upgrade your license type and purchase additional storage, which could quickly become costly. Additionally, if an employee accidentally or purposefully deletes items from the trash bin, the item may be gone forever.

Replication Is Not a Backup

Microsoft replicates data as part of its responsibility, but this doesn’t help you meet the requirements of a solid 3-2-1 strategy, where there are three copies of your data, one of which is off-site. So Microsoft doesn’t fully protect you and doesn’t support compliance standards that call for immutability. When Microsoft replicates data, they’re only making a second copy, and that copy is designed to be in sync with your production data. This means that an item gets corrupted and then replicated, the archive version is also corrupted, and you could lose crucial data. You can’t bank on M365’s replication to protect you.

Sync Is Not a Backup

Similarly, syncing is not backup protection and could end up hurting you. Syncing is designed to have a single copy of a file always up-to-date with changes you or other users have made on different devices. For example, if you use OneDrive as your cloud backup service, the bad news is that OneDrive will sync corrupted files overwriting your healthy ones. Essentially, if a file is deleted or infected, it will be infected or deleted on all synchronized devices. In contrast, a true backup allows you to restore from a specific point in time and provides access to previous versions of data, which can be useful in case of a ransomware attack or deletion.

Back Up Frequency and Control

Lastly, one of the biggest drawbacks of relying on Microsoft’s built-in backup tools is that you lack the ability to dial in your backup system the way you may want or need. There are several rules to follow in order to be able to recover or restore files in Microsoft 365. For instance, it’s strongly recommended that you save your documents in the cloud, both for syncing purposes and to enable things like Version History. But, if you delete an online-only file, it doesn’t go to your Recycle Bin, which means there’s no way to recover it. 

And, there are limits to the maximum numbers of versions saved when using Version History, the period of time a file is recoverable for, and so on. Some of the recovery periods even change depending on file type. For example, you can’t restore email after 30 days, but if you have an enterprise-level account, other file types are stored in your Recycle Bin or trash for up to 93 days.   

Backups may not be created as often as you like, and the recovery process isn’t quick or easy. For example, Microsoft backs up your data every 12 hours and retains it for 14 days. If you need to restore files, you must contact Microsoft Support, and they will perform a “full restore,” overwriting everything, not just the specific information you need. The recovery process probably won’t meet your recovery time objective (RTO) requirements. 

Compliance and Cyber Insurance

Many people want more control over their backups than what Microsoft offers, especially for mission-critical business data. In addition to having clarity and control over the backup and recovery process, data storage and backups are often an essential element in supporting compliance needs, particularly if your business stores personal identifiable information (PII). Different industries and regions will have different standards that need to be enforced, so it’s always a good idea to have your legal or compliance team involved in the conversation.  

Similarly, with the increasing frequency of ransomware attacks, many businesses are adding cyber insurance. Cyber insurance provides protection for a variety of things, including legal fees, expenditure related to breaches, court-ordered judgments, and forensic post-break review expenses. As a result, they often have stipulations about how and when you’re backing up to mitigate the fallout of business downtime. 

Backing Up M365 With a Third Party Tool to the Cloud

Instead of the native Microsoft 365 backup tool, you could use one of the many popular backup applications that provide Microsoft 365 backup support. Options include:

Note that some of these applications include Microsoft 365 protection with their standard license, but it’s an optional add-on module with others. Be sure to check licensing and pricing before choosing an option.  

One thing to keep in mind with these tools: if you store on-premises, the backup data they generate can be vulnerable to local disasters like fire or earthquakes and to cyberattacks. For example, if you keep backups on network attached storage (NAS) that doesn’t tier to the cloud, then your data would not be fully protected  

Backing your data up to the cloud puts a copy off-site and geographically distant from your production data, so it’s better protected from things like natural disasters. When you’re choosing a cloud storage provider, make sure you check out where they store their data—if their data center is just down the road, then you’ll want to pick a different region. 

Backblaze B2 + Microsoft 365

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is reliable, affordable, and secure backup cloud storage, and it integrates seamlessly with the third party applications listed above for backing up Microsoft 365. Some of the benefits of using Backblaze B2 include:

Check out our Help Center for Quick-Start Guides from partners like Veeam and MSP360.

Start backing up your Microsoft 365 data to Backblaze B2 today.

Protect Your M365 Data for Peace of Mind

Whether you are a business professional or an IT director, your goal is to protect your company data. Backing up your Microsoft 365 data to the cloud satisfies your RTO goals and better protects you against various threats. 

Relying on Microsoft 365 native tools is inefficient and slow, which means you could blow your RTO targets. Backing up to the cloud allows you to meet retention requirements, ensuring that you retain the data you need for as long as required without destroying your operational budget.

Your business-critical data is too important to trust to a native backup tool that doesn’t meet your needs. In the event of a catastrophic situation, you need complete control and quick access to all your files from a specific point in time. Backing your Microsoft 365 data up to the cloud gives you more control, more freedom, and better protection. 

The post Secure Your SaaS Tools: Back Up Microsoft 365 to the Cloud appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

From Response to Recovery: Developing a Cyber Resilience Framework

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/from-response-to-recovery-developing-a-cyber-resilience-framework/

A decorative image showing a globe icon surrounded by a search icon, a backup icon, a cog, a shield with a checkmark, and a checklist.

If you’re responsible for securing your company’s data, you’re likely well-acquainted with the basics of backups. You may be following the 3-2-1 rule and may even be using cloud storage for off-site backup of essential data.

But there’s a new model of iterative, process-improvement driven outcomes to improve business continuity, and it’s called cyber resilience. What is cyber resilience and why does it matter to your business? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Join Us for Our Upcoming Webinar

Learn more about how to strengthen your organization’s cyber resilience by protecting systems, responding to incidents, and recovering with minimal disruption at our upcoming webinar “Build Your Company’s Cyber Resilience: Protect, Respond, and Recover from Security Incidents” on Friday, June 9 at 10 a.m. PT/noon CT.

Join Us June 9 ➔

Plus, see a demo of Instant Business Recovery, an on-demand, fully managed disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution that works seamlessly with Veeam. Deploy and recover via a simple web interface or a phone call to instantly begin recovering critical servers and Veeam backups.

The Case for Cyber Resilience

The advance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, geopolitical tensions, and the ever-present threat of ransomware have all fundamentally changed the approach businesses must take to data security. In fact, the White House has prioritized cybersecurity by announcing a new cybersecurity strategy because of the increased risks of cyberattacks and the threat to critical infrastructure. And, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023, business continuity (67%) and reputational damage (65%) concern organization leaders more than any other cyber risk.

Cyber resilience assumes that it’s not if a security incident will occur, but when. 

Being cyber resilient means that a business is able to not only identify threats and protect against them, but also withstand attacks as they’re happening, respond effectively, and bounce back better—so that the business is better fortified against future incidents. 

What Is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber resilience is ultimately a holistic and continuous view of data protection; it implies that businesses can build more robust security practices, embed those throughout the organization, and put processes into place to learn from security threats and incidents in order to continuously shore up defenses. In the cyber resilience model, improving data security is no longer a finite series of checkbox items; it is not something that is ever “done.”

Unlike common backup strategies like 3-2-1 or grandfather-father-son that are well defined and understood, there is no singular model for cyber resilience. The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines cyber resiliency as the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to incidents that compromise systems. You’ll often see the cyber resilience model depicted in a circular fashion because it is a cycle of continuous improvement. While cyber resilience frameworks may vary slightly from one another, they all typically focus on similar stages, including:

  • Identify: Stay informed about emerging security threats, especially those that your systems are most vulnerable to. Share information throughout the organization when employees need to install critical updates and patches. 
  • Protect: Ensure systems are adequately protected with cybersecurity best practices like multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption at rest and in transit, and by applying the principle of least privilege. For more information on how to shore up your data protection, including data protected in cloud storage, check out our comprehensive checklist on cyber insurance best practices. Even if you’re not interested in cyber insurance, this checklist still provides a thorough resource for improving your cyber resilience.
  • Detect: Proactively monitor your network and system to ensure you can detect any threats as soon as possible.
  • Respond and Recover: Respond to incidents in the most effective way and ensure you can sustain critical business operations even while an incident is occurring. Plan your recovery in advance so your executive and IT teams are prepared to execute on it when the time comes.
  • Adapt: This is the key part. Run postmortems to understand what happened, what worked and what didn’t, and how it can be prevented in the future. This is how you truly build resilience.

Why Is Cyber Resilience Important?

Traditionally, IT leaders have excelled at thinking through backup strategy, and more and more IT administrators understand the value of next level techniques like using Object Lock to protect copies of data from ransomware. But, it’s less common to give attention to creating a disaster recovery (DR) plan, or thinking through how to ensure business continuity during and after an incident. 

In other words, we’ve been focusing too much on the time before an incident occurs and not enough on time on what to do during and after an incident. Consider the zero trust principle, which assumes that a breach is happening and it’s happening right now: taking such a viewpoint may seem negative, but it’s actually a proactive, not reactive, way to increase your business’ cyber resilience. When you assume you’re under attack, then your responsibility is to prove you’re not, which means actively monitoring your systems—and if you happen to discover that you are under attack, then your cybersecurity readiness measures kick in. 

How Is Cyber Resilience Different From Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is a set of practices on what to do before an incident occurs. Cyber resilience asks businesses to think more thoroughly about recovery processes and what comes after. Hence, cybersecurity is a component of cyber resilience, but cyber resilience is a much bigger framework through which to think about your business.

How Can I Improve My Business’ Cyber Resilience?

Besides establishing a sound backup strategy and following cybersecurity best practices, the biggest improvement that data security leaders can make is likely in helping the organization to shift its culture around cyber resilience.

  • Reframe cyber resilience. It is not solely a function of IT. Ensuring business continuity in the face of cyber threats can and should involve operations, legal, compliance, finance teams, and more.
  • Secure executive support now. Don’t wait until an incident occurs. Consider meeting on a regular basis with stakeholders to inform them about potential threats. Present if/then scenarios in terms that executives can understand: impact of risks, potential trade-offs, how incidents might affect customers or external partners, expected costs for mitigation and recovery, and timelines.
  • Practice your disaster recovery scenarios. Your business continuity plans should be run as fire drills. Ensure you have all stakeholders’ emergency/after hours contact information. Run tabletop exercises with any teams that need to be involved and conduct hypothetical retrospectives to determine how you can respond more efficiently if a given incident should occur.

It may seem overwhelming to try and adopt a cyber resiliency framework for your business, but you can start to move your organization in this direction by helping your internal stakeholders first shift their thinking. Acknowledging that a cyber incident will occur is a powerful way to realign priorities and support for data security leaders, and you’ll find that the momentum behind the effort will naturally help advance your security agenda.

Cyber Resilience Resources

Interested in learning more about how to improve business cyber resilience? Check out the free Backblaze resources below.

Looking for Support to Help Achieve Your Cyber Resilience Goals?

Backblaze provides end-to-end security and recovery solutions to ensure you can safeguard your systems with enterprise-grade security, immutability, and options for redundancy, plus fully-managed, on-demand disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)—all at one-fifth the cost of AWS. Get started today or contact Sales for more information on B2 Reserve, our all-inclusive capacity-based pricing that includes premium support and no egress fees.

The post From Response to Recovery: Developing a Cyber Resilience Framework appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

A Cyber Insurance Checklist: Learn How to Lower Risk to Better Secure Coverage

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-cyber-insurance-checklist-learn-how-to-lower-risk-to-better-secure-coverage/

A decorative image showing a cyberpig on a laptop with a shield blocking it from accessing a server.

If your business is looking into cyber insurance to protect your bottom line against security incidents, you’re in good company. The global market for cybersecurity insurance is projected to grow from 11.9 billion in 2022 to 29.2 billion by 2027.

But you don’t want to go into buying cyber security insurance blind. We put together this cyber insurance readiness checklist to help you strengthen your cyber resilience stance in order to better secure a policy and possibly a lower premium. (And even if you decide not to pursue cyber insurance, simply following some of these best practices will help you secure your company’s data.)

What is Cyber Insurance?

Cyber insurance is a specialty insurance product that is useful for any size business, but especially those dealing with large amounts of data. Before you buy cyber insurance, it helps to understand some fundamentals. Check out our post on cyber insurance basics to get up to speed.

Once you understand the basic choices available to you when securing a policy, or if you’re already familiar with how cyber insurance works, read on for the checklist.

Cyber Insurance Readiness Checklist

Cybersecurity insurance providers use their questionnaire and assessment period to understand how well-situated your business is to detect, limit, or prevent a cyber attack. They have requirements, and you want to meet those specific criteria to be covered at the most reasonable cost.

Your business is more likely to receive a lower premium if your security infrastructure is sound and you have disaster recovery processes and procedures in place. Though each provider has their own requirements, use the checklist below to familiarize yourself with the kinds of criteria a cyber insurance provider might look for. Any given provider may not ask about or require all these precautions; these are examples of common criteria. Note: Checking these off means your cyber resilience score is attractive to providers, though not a guarantee of coverage or a lower premium.

General Business Security

  • A business continuity/disaster recovery plan that includes a formal incident response plan is in place.
  • There is a designated role, group, or outside vendor responsible for information security.
  • Your company has a written information security policy.
  • Employees must complete social engineering/phishing training.
  • You set up antivirus software and firewalls.
  • You monitor the network in real-time.
  • Company mobile computing devices are encrypted.
  • You use spam and phishing filters for your email client.
  • You require two-factor authentication (2FA) for email, remote access to the network, and privileged user accounts.
  • You have an endpoint detection and response system in place.

Cloud Storage Security

  • Your cloud storage account is 2FA enabled. Note: Backblaze accounts have 2FA via SMS or via authentication apps using ToTP.
  • You encrypt data at rest and in transit. Note: Backblaze B2 provides server-side encryption (encryption at rest), and many of our partner integration tools, like Veeam, MSP360, and Archiware, offer encryption in transit.
  • You follow the 3-2-1 or 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategies and keep an air-gapped copy of your backup data (that is, a copy that’s not connected to your network).
  • You run backups frequently. You might consider implementing grandfather-father-son strategy for your cloud backups to meet this requirement.
  • You store backups off-site and in a geographically separate location. Note: Even if you keep a backup off-site, your cyber insurance provider may not consider this secure enough if your off-site copy is in the same geographic region or held at your own data center.
  • Your backups are protected from ransomware with object lock for data immutability.

AcenTek Adopts Cloud for Cyber Insurance Requirement

Learn how Backblaze customer AcenTek secured their data with B2 Cloud Storage to meet their cyber insurance provider’s requirement that backups be secured in a geographically distanced location.

By adding features like SSE, 2FA, and object lock to your backup security, insurance companies know you take data security seriously.

Cyber insurance provides the peace of mind that, when your company is faced with a digital incident, you will have access to resources with which to recover. And there is no question that by increasing your cybersecurity resilience, you’re more likely to find an insurer with the best coverage at the right price.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to ensure you have a robust backup strategy and security protocols in place. Even if you hope to never have to access your backups (because that might mean a security breach), it’s always smart to consider how fast you can restore your data should you need to, keeping in mind that hot storage is going to give you a faster recovery time objective (RTO) without any delays like those seen with cold storage like Amazon Glacier. And, with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage offering hot cloud storage at cold storage prices, you can afford to store all your data for as long as you need—at one-fifth the price of AWS.

Get Started With Backblaze

Get started today with pay-as-you-go pricing, or contact our Sales Team to learn more about B2 Reserve, our all-inclusive, capacity-based bundles starting at 20TB.

The post A Cyber Insurance Checklist: Learn How to Lower Risk to Better Secure Coverage appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Use Veeam’s V12 Direct-to-Object Storage Feature

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-use-veeams-v12-direct-to-object-storage-feature/

A decorative image showing the word Veeam and a cloud with the Backblaze logo.

If you already use Veeam, you’re probably familiar with using object storage, typically in the cloud, as your secondary repository using Veeam’s Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR). But Veeam v12, released on February 14, 2023, introduced a new direct-to-object storage feature that expands the way enterprises can use cloud storage and on-premises object storage for data protection.

Today, I’m talking through some specific use cases as well as the benefits of the direct-to-object storage feature, including fortifying your 3-2-1 backup strategy, ensuring your business is optimizing your cloud storage, and improving cyber resilience.

Meet Us at VeeamON

We hope to see you at this year’s VeeamON conference. Here are some highlights you can look forward to:

  • Check out our breakout session “Build a DRaaS Offering at No Extra Cost” on Tuesday, May 23, 1:30 p.m. ET to create your affordable, right-sized disaster recovery plan.
  • Join our Miami Beach Pub Crawl with phoenixNAP Tuesday, May 23 at 6 p.m. ET.
  • Come by the Backblaze booth for demos, swag, and more. Don’t forget to book your meeting time.

The Basics of Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage

Veeam’s v12 release added the direct-to-object storage feature that allows you to add object storage as a primary backup repository. This object storage can be an on-premises object storage system like Pure Storage or Cloudian or a cloud object storage provider like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s S3 compatible storage. You can configure the job to run as often as you would like, set your retention policy, and configure all the other settings that Veeam Backup & Replication provides.

Prior to v12, you had to use Veeam’s SOBR to save data to cloud object storage. Setting up the SOBR requires you to first add a local storage component, called your Performance Tier, as a primary backup repository. You can then add a Capacity Tier where you can copy backups to cloud object storage via the SOBR. Your Capacity Tier can be used for redundancy and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, or older backups can be completely off-loaded to cloud storage to free up space on your local storage component.

The diagram below shows how both the SOBR and direct-to-object storage methods work. As you can see, with the direct-to-object feature, you no longer have to first land your backups in the Performance Tier before sending them to cloud storage.

Why Use Cloud Object Storage With Veeam?

On-premises object storage systems can be a great resource for storing data locally and achieving the fastest recoveries, but they’re expensive especially if you’re maintaining capacity to store multiple copies of your data, and they’re still vulnerable to on-site disasters like fire, flood, or tornado. Cloud storage allows you to keep a backup copy in an off-site, geographically distanced location for DR purposes.

Additionally, while local storage will provide the fastest recovery time objective (RTO), cloud object storage can be effective in the case of an on-premises disaster as it serves the dual purpose of protecting your data and being off-site.

To be clear, the addition of direct-to-object storage doesn’t mean you should immediately abandon your SOBR jobs or your on-premises devices. The direct-to-object storage feature gives you more options and flexibility, and there are a few specific use cases where it works particularly well, which I’ll get into later.

How to Use Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage Feature

With v12, you can now use Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature in the Performance Tier, the Capacity Tier, or both. To understand how to use the direct-to-object storage feature to its full potential, you need to understand the implications of using object storage in your different tiers. I’ll walk through what that means.

Using Object Storage in Veeam’s Performance Tier

In earlier versions of Veeam’s backup software, the SOBR required the Performance Tier to be an on-premises storage device like a network attached storage (NAS) device. V12 changed that. You can now use an on-premises system or object storage, including cloud storage, as your Performance Tier.

So, why would you want to use cloud object storage, specifically Backblaze B2, as your Performance Tier?

  • Scalability: With cloud object storage as your Performance Tier, you no longer have to worry about running out of storage space on your local device.
  • Immutability: By enabling immutability on your Veeam console and in your Backblaze B2 account (using Object Lock), you can prevent your backups from being corrupted by a ransomware network attack like they might be if your Performance Tier was a local NAS.
  • Security: By setting cloud storage as your Performance Tier in the SOBR, you remove the threat of your backups being affected by a local disaster. With your backups safely protected off-site and geographically distanced from your primary business location, you can rest assured they are safe even if your business is affected by a natural disaster.

Understandably, some IT professionals prefer to keep on-premises copies of their backups because they offer the shortest RTO, but for many organizations, the pros of using cloud storage in the Performance Tier can outweigh the slightly longer RTO.

Using Object Storage in the Performance AND Capacity Tiers

If you’re concerned about overreliance on cloud storage but also feeling eager to eliminate often unwieldy, expensive, space-consuming physical local storage appliances, consider that Veeam v12 allows you to set cloud object storage as both your Performance and Capacity tier, which could add redundancy to ease your worries.

For instance, you could follow this approach:

  1. Create a Backblaze B2 Bucket in one region and set that as your primary repository using the SOBR.
  2. Send your Backup Jobs to that bucket (and make it immutable) as often as you would like.
  3. Create a second Backblaze B2 account with a bucket in a different region, and set it as your secondary repository.
  4. Create Backup Copy Jobs to replicate your data to that second region for added redundancy.

This may ease your concerns about using the cloud as the sole location for your backup data, as having two copies of your data—in geographically disparate regions—satisfies the 3-2-1 rule (since, even though you’re using one cloud storage service, the two backup copies of your data are kept in different locations.

Refresher: What is the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy?

A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different media, and at least one off-site copy (in the cloud).

Use Cases for Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage Feature

Now that you know how to use Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature, you might be wondering what it’s best suited to do. There are a few use cases where Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature really shines, including:

  • In remote offices
  • For NAS backup
  • For end-to-end immutability
  • For Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSP)

Using Direct-to-Object Storage in Remote Offices

The new functionality works well to support distributed and remote work environments.

Veeam had the ability to back up remote offices in v11, but it was unwieldy. When you wanted to back up the remote office, you had to back up the remote office to the main office, where the primary on-premises instance of Veeam Backup & Replication is installed, then use the SOBR to copy the remote office’s data to the cloud. This two-step process puts a strain on the main office network. With direct-to-object storage, you can still use a SOBR for the main office, and remote offices with smaller IT footprints (i.e. no on-premises device on which to create a Performance Tier) can send backups directly to the cloud.

If the remote office ever closes or suffers a local disaster, you can bring up its virtual machines (VMs) at the main office and get back in business quickly.

Using Direct-to-Object Storage for NAS Backup

NAS devices are often used as the Performance Tier for backups in the SOBR, and a business using a NAS may be just as likely to be storing its production data on the same NAS. For instance, a video production company might store its data on a NAS because it likes how easily a NAS incorporates into its workflows. Or a remote office branch may be using a NAS to store its data and make it easily accessible to the employees at that location.

With v11 and earlier versions, your production NAS had to be backed up to a Performance Tier and then to the cloud. And, with many Veeam users utilizing a NAS as their Performance Tier, this meant you had a NAS backing up to …another NAS, which made no sense.

For media and entertainment professionals in the field or IT administrators at remote offices, having to back up the production NAS to the main office (wherever that is located) before sending it to the cloud was inconvenient and unwieldy.

With v12, your production NAS can be backed up directly to the cloud using Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature.

Direct-to-Object Storage for End-to-End Immutability

As I mentioned, previous versions of Veeam required you to use local storage like a NAS as the Performance Tier in your SOBR, but that left your data vulnerable to security attacks. Now, with direct-to-object storage functionality, you can achieve an end-to-end immutability. Here’s how:

  • In the SOBR, designate an on-premises appliance that supports immutability as your primary repository (Performance Tier). Cloudian and Pure Storage are popular names to consider here.
  • Set cloud storage like Backblaze B2 as your secondary repository (Capacity Tier).
  • Enable Object Lock for immutability in your Backblaze B2 account and set the date of your lock.

With this setup, you check a lot of boxes:

  • You fulfill a 3-2-1 backup strategy.
  • Both your local data and your off-site data are protected from deletion, encryption, or modification.
  • Your infrastructure is provisioned for the fastest RTO with your local storage.
  • You’ve also fully protected your data—including your local copy—from a ransomware attack.

Immutability for NAS Data in the Cloud

Backing up your NAS straight to the cloud with Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature means you can enable immutability using the Veeam console and Object Lock in Backblaze B2. Few NAS devices natively support immutability, so using Veeam and B2 Cloud Storage to back up your NAS offers all the benefits of secure, off-site backup plus protection from ransomware.

Direct-to-Object Storage for VCSPs

The direct-to-object storage feature also works well for VCSPs. It changes how VCSPs use Cloud Connect, Veeam’s offering for service partners. A VCSP can send customer backups straight to the cloud instead of first sending them to the VCSP’s own systems.

Veeam V12 and Cyber Resiliency

When it comes to protecting your data, ultimately, you want to make the decision that best meets your business continuity and cyber resilience requirements. That means ensuring you not only have a sound backup strategy, but that you also consider what your data restoration process will look like during an active security incident (because a security incident is more likely to happen than not).

Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature gives you more options for establishing a backup strategy that meets your RTO and DR requirements while also staying within your budget and allowing you to use the most optimal and preferred kind of storage for your use case.

Veeam + Backblaze: Now Even Easier

Get started today for $5/TB per month, pay-as-you-go cloud storage. Or contact your favorite reseller, like CDW or SHI to purchase Backblaze via B2 Reserve, our all-inclusive, capacity-based bundles.

The post How to Use Veeam’s V12 Direct-to-Object Storage Feature appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How Long Should You Keep Backups?

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-should-you-keep-backups/

A decorative image showing a calendar, a laptop, a desktop, and a phone.

You know you need to back up your data. Maybe you’ve developed a backup strategy and gotten the process started, or maybe you’re still in the planning phase. Now you’re starting to wonder: how long do I need to keep all these backups I’m going to accumulate? It’s the right question to ask, but the truth is there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

How long you keep your backups will depend on your IT team’s priorities, and will include practical factors like storage costs and the operational realities that define the usefulness of each backup. Highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare have even more challenges to consider on top of that. With all that in mind, here’s what you need to know to determine how long you should keep your backups.

First Things First: You Need a Retention Policy

If you’re asking how long you should keep your backups, you’re already on your way to designing a retention policy. Your organization’s retention policy is the official protocol that will codify your backup strategy from top to bottom. The policy should not just outline what data you’re backing up and for how long, but also explain why you’ve determined to keep it for that length of time and what you plan to do with it beyond that point.

Practically speaking, the decision about how long to keep your backups boils down to a balancing act between storage costs and operational value. You need to understand how long your backups will be useful in order to determine when it’s time to replace or dispose of them; keeping backups past their viability leads to both unnecessary spend and the kind of complexity that breeds risk.

Backup vs. Archive

Disposal isn’t the only option when a backup ages. Sometimes it’s more appropriate to archive data as a long-term storage option. As your organization’s data footprint expands, it’s important to determine how you interact with different types of data to make the best decisions about how to safeguard it (and for how long).

While backups are used to restore data in case of loss or damage, or to return a system to a previous state, archives are more often used to off-load data from faster or more frequently accessed storage systems.

  • Backup: A data recovery strategy for when loss, damage, or disaster occurs.
  • Archive: A long-term or permanent data retrieval strategy for data that is not as likely to be accessed, but still needs to be retained.

Knowing archiving is an option can impact how long you decide to keep your backups. Instead of deleting them completely, you can choose to move them from short-term storage into a long-term archive. For instance, you could choose to keep more recent backups on premises, perhaps stored on a local server or network attached storage (NAS) device, and move your archives to cloud storage for long-range safekeeping.

How you choose to store your backups can also be a factor into your decision on how long to keep them. Moving archives to cloud storage is more convenient than other long-term retention strategies like tape. Keeping archives in cloud storage could allow you to keep that data for longer simply because it’s less time-consuming than maintaining tape archives, and you also don’t have to worry about the deterioration of tape over time.

Putting your archive in cloud storage can help manage the cost side of the equation, too, but only if handled carefully. While cloud storage is typically cheaper than tape archives in the long run, you might save even more by moving your archives from hot to cold storage. For most cloud storage providers, cold storage is generally a cheaper option if you’re talking dollars per GB stored. But, it’s important to remember that retrieving data from cold storage can incur high egress fees and take 12–48 hours to retrieve data. When you need to recover data quickly, such as in a ransomware attack or cybersecurity breach, each moment you don’t have your data means more time your business is not online—and that’s expensive.

How One School District Balances Storage Costs and Retention

With 200 servers and 125TB of data, Bethel School District outside of Tacoma, Washington needed a scalable cloud storage solution for archiving server backups. They’d been using Amazon S3, but high costs were straining their budget—so much so that they had to shorten needed retention periods.

Moving to Backblaze produced savings of 75%, and Backblaze’s flat pricing structure gives the school district a predictable invoice, eliminating the guesswork they anticipated from other solutions. They’re also planning to reinstate a longer retention period for better protection from ransomware attacks, as they no longer need to control spiraling Amazon S3 costs.

Next Order of Business: The Structure of Your Backup Strategy

The types of backups you’re storing will also factor into how long you keep them. There are many different ways to structure a secure backup strategy, and it’s likely that your organization will interact with each kind of backup differently. Some backup types need to be stored for longer than others to do their job, and those decisions have a lot to do with how the various types interact to form an effective strategy.

The Basics: 3-2-1

The 3-2-1 backup strategy is the widely accepted industry minimum standard. It dictates keeping three copies of your data: two stored locally (on two different types of devices) and one stored off-site. This diversified backup strategy covers all the bases; it’s easy to access backups stored on-site, while off-site (and often offline or immutable) backups provide security through redundancy. It’s probably a good idea to have a specific retention policy for each of your three backups—even if you end up keeping your two locally stored files for the same length of time—because each copy serves a different purpose in your broader backup strategy.

Full vs. Incremental Backups

While designing your backup strategy, you’ll also need to choose how you’re using full versus incremental backups. Performing full backups each time (like completely backing up a work computer daily) requires huge amounts of time, bandwidth, and space, which all inflate your storage usage at the end of the day. Other options serve to increase efficiency and reduce your storage footprint.

  • Full backup: A complete copy of your data, starting from scratch either without any pre-existing backups or as if no other backup exists yet.
  • Incremental backup: A copy of any data that has been added or changed since your last full backup (or your last incremental backup).

When thinking about how long to keep your full backups, consider how far back you may need to completely restore a system. Many cyber attacks can go unnoticed for some time. For instance, you could learn that an employee’s computer was infected with malware or a virus several months ago, and you need to completely restore their system with a full backup. It’s not uncommon for businesses to keep full backups for a year or even longer. On the other hand, incremental backups may not need to be kept for as long because you can always just restore from a full backup instead.

Grandfather-Father-Son Backups

Effectively combining different backup types into a cohesive strategy leads to a staggered, chronological approach that is greater than the sum of its parts. The grandfather-father-son system is a great example of this concept in action. Here’s an example of how it might work:

  1. Grandfather: A monthly full backup is stored either off-site or in the cloud.
  2. Father: Weekly full backups are stored locally in a hot cloud storage solution.
  3. Son: Daily incremental backups are stored as a stopgap alongside father backups.

It makes sense that different types of backups will need to be stored for different lengths of time and in different places. You’ll need to make decisions about how long to keep old full backups (once they’ve been replaced with newer ones), for example. The type and the age of your data backups, along with their role in the broader context of your strategy, should factor into your determination about how long to keep them.

A Note on Minimum Storage Duration Policies

When considering cloud storage to store your backups, it’s important to know that many providers have minimum storage duration policies. These are fees charged for data that is not kept in cloud storage for some period of time defined by the cloud storage provider, and it can be anywhere from 30–180 days. These are essentially delete penalties—minimum retention requirement fees apply not only to data that gets deleted from cloud storage but also any data that is overwritten. Think about that in the context of the backup strategies we’ve just outlined: each time you create a new full backup, you’re overwriting data.

So if, for example, you choose a cloud storage provider with a 90-day minimum storage duration, and you keep your full backups for 60 days, you will be charged fees each time you overwrite or delete a backup. Some cloud storage providers, like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, do not have a minimum storage duration policy, so you do not have to let that influence how long you choose to keep backups. That kind of flexibility to keep, overwrite, and delete your data as often as you need is important to manage your storage costs and business needs without the fear of surprise bills or hidden fees.

Don’t Forget: Your Industry’s Regulations Can Tip the Scales

While weighing storage costs and operational needs is the fundamental starting point of any retention policy, it’s also important to note that many organizations face regulatory requirements that complicate the question of how long to keep backups. Governing bodies designed to protect both individuals and business interests often mandate that certain kinds of data be readily available and producible upon request for a set amount of time, and they require higher standards of data protection when you’re storing personally identifiable information (PII). Here are some examples of industries with their own unique data retention regulations:

  • Healthcare: Medical and patient data retention is governed by HIPAA rules, but how those rules are applied can vary from state to state.
  • Insurance: Different types of policies are governed by different rules in each state, but insurance companies do generally need to comply with established retention periods. More recently, companies have also been adding cyber insurance, which comes with its own set of requirements.
  • Finance: A huge web of legislation (like the Bank Secrecy Act, Electronic Funds Transfer Act, and more) mandates how long banking and financial institutions must retain their data.
  • Education: Universities sit in an interesting space. On one hand, they store a ton of sensitive data about their students. They’re often public services, which means that there’s a certain amount of governmental regulation attached. They also store vast amounts of data related to research, and often have on-premises servers and private clouds to protect—and that’s all before you get to larger universities which have medical centers and hospitals attached. With all that in mind, it’s unsurprising that they’re subject to higher standards for protecting data.

Federal and regional legislation around general data security can also dictate how long a company needs to keep backups depending on where it does business (think GDPR, CCPA, etc.). So in addition to industry-specific regulations, your company’s primary geographic location—or your customers’ location—can also influence how long you need to keep data backups.

The Bottom Line: How Long You Keep Backups Will Be Unique to Your Business

The answer to how long you need to keep your backups has everything to do with the specifics of your organization. The industry you’re in, the type of data you deal with, and the structure of your backup strategy should all combine to inform your final decision. And as we’ve seen, you’ll likely wind up with multiple answers to the question pertaining to all the different types of backups you need to create and store.

The post How Long Should You Keep Backups? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How To Do Bare Metal Backup and Recovery

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-do-bare-metal-backup-and-recovery/

A decorative image with a broken server stack icon on one side, the cloud in the middle, then a fixed server icon on the right.

When you’re creating or refining your backup strategy, it’s important to think ahead to recovery. Hopefully you never have to deal with data loss, but any seasoned IT professional can tell you—whether it’s the result of a natural disaster or human error—data loss will happen.

With the ever-present threat of cybercrime and the use of ransomware, it is crucial to develop an effective backup strategy that also considers how quickly data can be recovered. Doing so is a key pillar of increasing your business’ cyber resilience: the ability to withstand and protect from cyber threats, but also bounce back quickly after an incident occurs. The key to that effective recovery may lie with bare metal recoveries.

In this guide, we will discuss what bare metal recovery is, its importance, the challenges of its implementation, and how it differs from other methods.

Creating Your Backup Recovery Plan

Your backup plan should be part of a broader disaster recovery (DR) plan that aims to help you minimize downtime and disruption after a disaster event.

A good backup plan starts with, at bare minimum, following the 3-2-1 rule. This involves having at least three copies of your data, two local copies (on-site) and at least one copy off-site. But it doesn’t end there. The 3-2-1 rule is evolving, and there are additional considerations around where and how you back up your data.

As part of an overall disaster recovery plan, you should also consider whether to use file and/or image-based backups. This decision will absolutely inform your DR strategy. And it leads to another consideration—understanding how to use bare metal recovery. If you plan to use bare metal recovery (and we’ll explain the reasons why you might want to), you’ll need to plan for image-based backups.

What Is Bare Metal Backup?

The term “bare metal” means a machine without an operating system (OS) installed on it. Fundamentally, that machine is “just metal”—the parts and pieces that make up a computer or server. A “bare metal backup” is designed so that you can take a machine with nothing else on it and restore it to your normal state of work. That means that the backup data has to contain the operating system (OS), user data, system settings, software, drivers, and applications, as well as all of the files. The terms image-based backups and bare metal backups are often used interchangeably to mean the process of creating backups of entire system data.

Bare metal backup is a favored method by many businesses because it ensures absolutely everything is backed up. This allows the entire system to be restored should a disaster result in total system failure. File-based backup strategies are, of course, very effective when just backing up folders and large media files, but when you’re talking about getting people back to work, a lot of man hours go into properly setting up a workstations to interact with internal networks, security protocols, proprietary or specialized software, etc. Since file-based backups do not back up the operating system and its settings, they are almost obsolete in modern IT environments, and operating on a file-based backup strategy can put businesses at significant risk or add downtime in the event of business interruption.

How Does Bare Metal Backup Work?

Bare metal backups allow data to be moved from one physical machine to another, to a virtual server, from a virtual server back to a physical machine, or from a virtual machine to a virtual server—offering a lot of flexibility.

This is the recommended method for backing up preferred system configurations so they can be transferred to other machines. The operating system and its settings can be quickly copied from a machine that is experiencing IT issues or has failing hardware, for example. Additionally, with a bare metal backup, virtual servers can also be set up very quickly instead of configuring the system from scratch.

What is Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) or Bare-Metal Restore?

As the name suggests, bare metal recovery is the process of recovering the bare metal (image-based) backup. By launching a bare metal recovery, a bare metal machine will retrieve its previous operating system, all files, folders, programs, and settings, ensuring the organization can resume operations as quickly as possible.

How Does Bare Metal Recovery Work?

A bare metal recovery (or restore) works by recovering the image of a system that was created during the bare metal backup. The backup software can then reinstate the operating system, settings, and files on a bare metal machine so it is fully functional again.

This type of recovery is typically issued in a disaster situation when a full server recovery is required, or when hardware has failed.

Why Is BMR Important?

The importance of BMR is dependent on an organization’s recovery time objective (RTO), the metric for measuring how quickly IT infrastructure can return online following a data disaster. The need for high-speed recovery, which in most cases is a necessity, means many businesses use bare metal recovery as part of their backup recovery plan.

If an OS becomes corrupted or damaged and you do not have a sufficient recovery plan in place, then the time needed to reinstall it, update it, and apply patches can result in significant downtime. BMR allows a server to be completely restored on a bare metal machine to its exact settings and configured simply and quickly.

Another key factor for choosing BMR is to protect against cybercrime. If your IT team can pinpoint the time when a system was infected with malware or ransomware, then a restore can be executed to wipe the machine clean of any threats and remove the source of infection, effectively rolling the system back to a time when everything was running smoothly.

BMR’s flexibility also means that it can be used to restore a physical or virtual machine, or simply as a method of cloning machines for easier deployment in the future.

The key advantages of bare metal recovery (BMR) are:

  • Speed: BMR offers faster recovery speeds than if you had to reinstall your OS and run updates and patches. It restores every system element to its exact state as when it was backed up, from the layout of desktop icons to the latest software updates and patches—you do not have to rebuild it step by step.
  • Security: If a system is subjected to a ransomware attack or any other type of malware or virus, a bare metal restore allows you to safely erase an entire machine or system and restore from a backup created before the attack.
  • Simplicity: Bare metal recovery can be executed without installing any additional software on the bare machine.

BMR: Some Caveats

Like any backup and recovery method, some IT environments may be more suitable for BMR than others, and there are some caveats that an organization should be aware of before implementing such a strategy.

First, bare metal recovery can experience issues if the restore is being executed on a machine with dissimilar hardware. The reason for this is that the original operating system copy needs to load the correct drivers to match the machine’s hardware. Therefore, if there is no match, then the system will not boot.

Fortunately, Backblaze Partner integrations, like MSP360, have features that allow you to restore to dissimilar hardware with no issues. This is a key feature to look for when considering BMR solutions. Otherwise, you have to seek out a new machine that has the same hardware as the corrupted machine.

Second, there may be a reason for not wanting to run BMR, such as a minor data accident when a simple file/folder restore is more practical, taking less time to achieve the desired results. A bare metal recovery strategy is recommended when a full machine needs to be restored, so it is advised to include several different options in your backup recovery plan to cover all scenarios.

Bare Metal Recovery in the Cloud

An on-premises disaster disrupts business operations and can have catastrophic implications for your bottom line. And, if you’re unable to run your preferred backup software, performing a bare metal recovery may not even be an option. Backblaze has created a solution that draws data from Veeam Backup & Replication backups stored in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to quickly bring up an orchestrated combination of on-demand servers, firewalls, networking, storage, and other infrastructure in phoenixNAP’s bare metal cloud servers. This Instant Business Recovery (IBR) solution includes fully-managed, affordable 24/7 disaster recovery support from Backblaze’s managed service provider partner specializing in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

IBR allows your business to spin up your entire environment, including the data from your Backblaze B2 backups, in the cloud. With this active DR site in the cloud, you can keep business operations running while restoring your on-premises systems. Recovery is initiated via a simple web form or phone call. Instant Business Recovery protects your business in the case of on-premises disaster for a fraction of the cost of typical managed DRaaS solutions. As you build out your business continuity plan, you should absolutely consider how to sustain your business in the case of damage to your local infrastructure; Instant Business Recovery allows you to begin recovering your servers in minutes to ensure you meet your RTO.

BMR and Cloud Storage

Bare metal backup and recovery should be a key part of any DR strategy. From moving operating systems and files from one physical machine to another, to transferring image-based backups from a virtual machine to a virtual server, it’s a tool that makes sense as part of any IT admin’s toolbox.

Your next question is where to store your bare metal backups, and cloud storage makes good sense. Even if you’re already keeping your backups off-site, it’s important for them to be geographically distanced in case your entire area experiences a natural disaster or outage. That takes more than just backing up to the cloud, really—it’s important to know where your cloud storage provider stores their data for both compliance standards, speed of content delivery (if that’s a concern), and to ensure that you’re not unintentionally storing your off-site backup close to home.

Remember that these are critical backups you’ll need in a disaster scenario, so consider recovery time and expense when choosing a cloud storage provider. While it may seem more economical to use cold storage, it comes with long recovery times and high fees to recover quickly. Using always-hot cloud storage is imperative, both for speed and to avoid an additional expense in the form of a bill for egress fees after you’ve recovered from a cyberattack.

Host Your Bare Metal Backups in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage provides S3 compatible, Object Lock-capable hot storage for one-fifth the cost of AWS and other public clouds—with no trade-off in performance.

Get started today, and contact us to support a customized proof of concept (PoC) for datasets of more than 50TB.

The post How To Do Bare Metal Backup and Recovery appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

What Is Cyber Insurance?

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-is-cyber-insurance/

A decorative image with a pig typing on a computer, then directional lines moving from the computer to a lock icon. One the right of the image is a dollar sign, a shield with a check mark, and a box with four asterisks.

Cybersecurity insurance was once a niche product for companies with the highest risk profiles. But recently, it has found its way into the mainstream as more and more businesses face data disasters that can cause loss of revenue, extended downtime, and compliance violations if sensitive data gets leaked.

You may have considered cybersecurity insurance (also called cyber insurance) but maybe you weren’t sure if it was right for your business. In the meantime, you prioritized reducing vulnerability to cyber incidents that threaten business continuity, like accidental or malicious data breaches, malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks.

Pat yourself on the back: By strengthening your company’s prevention, detection, and response to cyber threats, you’re also more attractive to cyber insurance providers. Being cyber resilient can save you money on cyber insurance if you decide it’s right for you.

Today, I’m breaking down the basics of cyber insurance: What is it? How much will it cost? And how do you get it?

Do I Need Cyber Insurance?

Cyber insurance has become more common as part of business continuity planning. Like many things in the cybersecurity world, it can be a bit hard to measure precise adoption numbers because most historical data is self reported. But, reports from the Government Accountability Office indicate that major insurance brokers have seen uptake nearly double from 2016 to 2020. During and following the pandemic, enterprises saw a sharp rise in cyberattacks and data breaches, and, while data collection and analysis is still ongoing, experts anticipate the cyber insurance industry to expand in response. Take a look at these three data points in cybersecurity risk:

  1. In the U.S., recovering from a cyberattack cost twice as much in 2019 as it did in 2016.
  2. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in the U.S. is $9.44M versus $4.35M globally.
  3. For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), recovery is more challenging—60% of SMBs fold in the six months following a cyberattack.

Whether your company is a 10 person software as a service (SaaS) startup or a global enterprise, cyber insurance could be the difference between a minor interruption of business services and closing up for good. However, providers don’t opt to provide coverage for every business that applies for cyber insurance. If you want coverage (and there are plenty of reasons why you would), it helps to prepare by making your company as attractive (meaning low-risk) as possible to cyber insurers.

What Is Cyber Insurance?

Cyber insurance protects your business from losses resulting from a digital attack. This can include business income loss, but it also includes coverage for unforeseen expenses, including:

  • Forensic post-breach review expenses.
  • Additional monitoring outflows.
  • The expenditure for notifying parties of a breach.
  • Public relations service expenses.
  • Litigation fees.
  • Accounting expenses.
  • Court-ordered judgments.
  • Claims disbursements.

Cyber insurance policies may also cover ransom payments. However, according to expert guidance, it is never advisable or prudent to pay the ransom, even if it’s covered by insurance. Ultimately, the most effective way to undermine the motivation of these criminal groups is to reduce the potential for profit. For this reason, the Administration strongly discourages the payment of ransoms.

There are a few reasons for this:

  1. It’s not guaranteed that cybercriminals will provide a decryption key to recover your data. They’re criminals after all.
  2. It’s not guaranteed that, even with a decryption key, you’ll be able to recover your data. This could be intentional, or simply poor design on the part of cybercriminals. Ransomware code is notoriously buggy.
  3. Paying the ransom encourages cybercriminals to keep plying their trade, and can even result in businesses that pay being hit by the same ransomware demand twice.

Types of Cyber Insurance

What plans cover and how much they cost can vary. Typically, you can choose between first-party coverage, third-party coverage, or both.

First-party coverage protects your own data and includes coverage for business expenses related to things like recovery of lost or stolen data, lost revenue due to business interruption, and legal counsel, and other types of expenses.

Third-party coverage protects your business from liability claims brought by someone outside the company. This type of policy might cover things like payments to consumers affected by a data breach, costs for litigation brought by third parties, and losses related to defamation.

Depending on how substantial a digital attack’s losses could be to your business, your best choice may be both first- and third-party coverage.

Cyber Insurance Policy Coverage Considerations

Cyber insurance protects your company’s bottom line by helping you pay for costs related to recovering lost or stolen data and cover costs incurred by affected third parties (if you have third-party coverage).

As you might imagine, cyber insurance policies vary. When reviewing cyber insurance policies, it’s important to ask these questions:

  1. Does this policy cover a variety of digital attacks, especially the ones we’re most susceptible to?
  2. Can we add services, if needed, such as active monitoring, incident response support, defense against liability lawsuits, and communication intermediaries?
  3. What are the policy’s exclusions? For example, unlikely circumstances like acts of war or terrorism and well-known, named viruses may not be covered in the policy.
  4. How much do the premiums and deductibles cost for the coverage we need?
  5. What are the coverage (payout) amounts or limitations?

Keep in mind that choosing the company with the lowest premiums may not be the best strategy. For further reading, the Federal Trade Commission offers a helpful checklist of additional considerations for choosing a cyber insurance policy.

Errors & Omissions (E & O) Coverage

Technology errors and omissions (E & O) coverage isn’t technically cyber insurance, but could be part of a comprehensive policy. This type of coverage protects your business from expenses that may be incurred if/when your product or service fails to deliver or doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. This can be confused with cyber insurance coverage because it protects your business in the case your technology product or service fails. The difference is that E & O coverage comes into effect when that failure is due to the business’ own negligence.

You may want to pay the upcharge for E & O coverage to protect against harm caused if/when your product or service fails to deliver or work as intended. E & O also offers coverage for data loss stemming from employee errors or employee negligence in following data safeguards already in place. Consider whether you also need this type of protection and ask your cyber insurer if they offer E & O policies.

Premiums, Deductibles, and Coverage—Oh, My!

What are the average premium costs, deductible amounts, and liability coverage for a business like yours? The answer to that question turns out to be more complex than you’d think.

How Are Premiums Determined?

Every insurance provider is different, but here are common factors that affect cyber insurance premiums:

  • Your industry (e.g., education, healthcare, and financial industries are higher risk).
  • Your company size (e.g., more employees increase risk).
    Amount and sensitivity of your data (e.g., school districts with student and faculty personal identifiable information are at higher risk).
  • Your revenue (e.g., a profitable bank will be more attractive to cybercriminals).
  • Your investment in cybersecurity (e.g., lower premiums go to companies with dedicated resources and policies around cybersecurity).
  • Coverage limit (e.g., the cost per incident will decrease with a lower liability limit).
  • Deductible (e.g., the more you pay per incident, the less your plan’s premium).

What Does the Average Premium Cost?

These days, it’s challenging to estimate the true cost of an attack because historical data haven’t been widely shared. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the rising “frequency, severity, and cost of cyberattacks” increases cyber insurance premiums.

But, generally speaking, if you are willing to cover more of the cost of a data breach, your deductible rises, and your premium falls. Data from 43 insurance companies in the U.S. reveal that cyber insurance premiums range between $650-$2,357 for businesses with $1,000,000 in revenue for policies with $1,000,000 in liability and a $10,000 deductible.

How Do I Get Cyber Insurance?

Most companies start with an online quote from a cyber insurance provider, but many will eventually need to compile more detailed and specific information in order to get the most accurate figures.

If you’re a small business owner, you may have all the information you need at hand, but for mid-market and enterprise companies, securing a cyber insurance policy should be a cross-functional effort. You’ll need information from finance, legal, and compliance departments, IT, operations, and perhaps other divisions to ensure cyber insurance coverage and policy terms meet your company’s needs.

Before the quote, an insurance company will perform a risk assessment of your business in order to determine the cost to insure you. A typical cyber insurance questionnaire might include specific, detailed questions in the areas of organizational structure, legal and compliance requirements, business policies and procedures, and questions about your technical infrastructure. Here are some questions you might encounter:

  • Organizational: What kind of third-party data do you store or process on your computer systems?
  • Legal & Compliance: Are you aware of any disputes over your business website address and domain name?
  • Policies & Procedures: Do you have a business continuity plan in place?
  • Technical: Do you utilize a cloud provider to store data or host applications?

Cyber Insurance Readiness

Now that you know the basics of cyber insurance, you can be better prepared when the time comes to get insured. As I mentioned in the beginning, shoring up your vulnerability to cyber incidents goes a long way toward helping you acquire cyber insurance and get the best premiums possible. One great way to get started is to establish a solid backup strategy with an offsite, immutable backup. And you can do all of that with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as the storage backbone for your backup plan. Get started today safeguarding your backups in Backblaze B2.

Stay Tuned: More to Come

I’ll be digging into more specific steps you can take to get cyber insurance ready in an upcoming post, so stay tuned for more, including a checklist to help make your cyber resilience stance more attractive to providers.

The post What Is Cyber Insurance? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Thinking Through Your Cloud Strategy With Veeam’s V12 Release

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/thinking-through-your-cloud-strategy-with-veeams-v12-release/

We wouldn’t normally make a big deal about another company’s version release except this one is, well… kind of a big deal. Unlike most software releases that fly under the radar, there are big implications—for your backup strategy, your cloud storage usage, and your budget.

Leading backup and recovery provider, Veeam, announced the release of Version 12 (v12) of its popular Backup & Replication software on February 14. And we’re feeling the backup love.

So, what’s the big deal? With this release, Veeam customers can send backups directly to the cloud instead of (or in addition to) routing them to local storage first. Ultimately, the changes announced in v12 provide for easier backups, more diversified workloads, more flexibility in your cloud strategy, and capital expense (CapEx) savings on local storage.

Today, we’re breaking down what all that means and how you can take advantage of the changes to optimize your backup strategy and cloud storage spend.

Save the Date for VeeamON 2023 May 22–24 in Miami

Learn more about the Veeam v12 release and how Backblaze and Veeam make modern data protection easy. Backblaze is proud to be a Platinum sponsor at VeeamON this year and we look forward to seeing you there!

About Veeam

Veeam is a leader in backup, recovery, and data management solutions. They offer a single platform for cloud, virtual, physical, software as a service (SaaS), and Kubernetes environments. Their products help customers own, control, and protect data anywhere in the hybrid cloud.

Customers can already select Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as a destination for their Veeam backups, and doing so just got a whole lot easier with v12. Read on to learn more.

How Veeam Previously Worked with Cloud Storage

Prior to v12, cloud object storage was enabled in Veeam through the Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR). To set up the Cloud Tier, you first had to set up a local repository for your backup data. Many people used a NAS for this purpose, but it could also be a SAN, hard drives, etc. This was your primary repository, also known as your performance tier.

Here’s an example workflow with SOBR and Backblaze B2.

You needed enough capacity on your local repository to land the data there first before you could then use the Veeam console to Move or Copy it to the cloud. If your data set is perpetually growing (and whose isn’t?), you previously had to either tier off more data to the cloud to free up local capacity, or invest in more local storage.

Veeam v12 changes all that.

Veeam v12 Gives You Choices

With this new version release, the primary repository can now be local, on-premises storage, or it can also be local object storage arrays or cloud storage like Backblaze B2.

You can still use the SOBR or back up direct to object storage. This opens up a whole range of benefits, including:

  • Easier Backups: You can now use the Backup Job functionality to send your data straight to the cloud. You no longer need to land it in local storage first. You can also create multiple Backup Jobs that go to different destinations. For instance, to better fortify your backup strategy, you can create a Backup Job to a Backblaze B2 Bucket in one region and then a Backup Copy Job to a B2 Bucket in a different region for redundancy purposes.
  • Diversified Workloads: More choices give you the ability to think through your workloads and how you want to optimize them for cost and access. You may want to send less critical workloads—like older backups, archives, or data from less important work streams—to the cloud to free up capacity on your local storage. You can do this by editing your Backup Jobs (using the Move backup function) that were previously routing through the SOBR to cloud storage to point directly to cloud object storage instead.
  • More Flexibility: v12 allows for more flexibility to use cloud storage in your backup strategy. You have options, including:
    • Making your primary repository on-premises and using the cloud as part of your Capacity Tier in the SOBR.
    • Moving to a fully cloud-based repository.
    • Mixing your use of the SOBR and direct-to-object storage Backup Jobs to optimize your disaster recovery (DR) strategy, recovery needs, and costs.
  • CapEx Savings: You no longer need to keep investing in more local storage as your data set grows. Rather than buying another server or NAS, you can optimize your existing infrastructure by more easily off-loading data to cloud storage to free up capacity on on-premises devices.

What’s Next: Thinking Through Your Strategy

Great, you have more choices. But which choice should you make, and why?

Ultimately, you want to increase your company’s cyber resilience. Your backup strategy should be airtight, but you also need to think through your recovery process and your DR strategy as well. We’ll explain a couple different ways you could make use of the functionality v12 provides and break down the pros and cons of each.

Scenario 1: Using Cloud Storage as Part of Your SOBR

In this case, your on-premises storage is your primary repository and the cloud is your secondary repository. The advantage of an on-premises repository is that it’s often going to give you the fastest, easiest access to recovery. If your recovery time objective (RTO) is very short, a local backup is likely going to give you the fastest data restoration option to meet that RTO goal.

Then, copy your backups to cloud storage to ensure you have another copy in case of a local disaster. This is always good practice as part of the 3-2-1 rule or 3-2-1-1-0 rule. Why is it important to have a copy in cloud storage? Well, even if you store backups for disaster recovery at another location, is your DR site far away enough? Is it immune from a local disaster? If not, you need another copy in the cloud in a location that’s geographically distanced from you.

Scenario 2: Using the Cloud as Your Primary Repository

In this case, the cloud is your primary repository. Direct backups to cloud object storage from Veeam are helpful for the following use cases:

  • Less critical workloads: This could include a lesser-used server, archived projects, files, and data; or business data that is less critical to restore in the case of disaster recovery.
  • To free up local storage: If you’re running up against a lack of local storage and need to make a decision on spending more for additional on-premises storage, the cloud is often more affordable than investing in additional physical storage devices.
  • Workloads where slightly longer recovery periods are acceptable: If you can handle a slightly longer recovery period, cloud storage is a good fit. But remember that not all cloud storage is created equal. Backblaze B2, for example, is always-hot storage, so you won’t have to worry about cold storage delays like you might with AWS Glacier.
  • To migrate away from an LTO system: If you were previously sending backup copy jobs to tape, you can now more easily use cloud storage as a replacement.
  • To eliminate a secondary on-premises location: Maybe you are worried your backups are stored too close to each other, or you simply want to get rid of a secondary on-premises location. The direct-to-cloud option gives you this option. You can reroute those backup copy jobs to copy direct-to-cloud object storage instead.
  • To eliminate on-premises backups altogether: Of course, if you want to completely eliminate local backups for whatever reason, you can now do that by sending all your backup and archive data to the cloud only, although you should carefully consider the implications of that strategy for your disaster recovery plan.

Planning for Disaster Recovery—How You’ll Restore

While it’s important to think about how to optimize your backup strategy using the new functionality introduced by v12, it’s equally as important to think about how you’ll restore business operations in the case of an on-premises disaster. Backblaze offers a unique solution through its partnerships with Veeam and PhoenixNAP—Instant Recovery in Any Cloud.

With this solution, you can run a single command using an industry-standard automation tool to quickly bring up an orchestrated combination of on-demand servers, firewalls, networking, storage, and other infrastructure in phoenixNAP. The command draws data from Veeam backups immediately to your VMware/Hyper-V based environment, so businesses can get back online with minimal disruption or expense. Best of all, there’s no cost unless you actually need to use the solution, so there’s no reason not to set it up now.

Instant Recovery in Any Cloud works with both of the scenarios described above—whether your cloud is your primary or secondary repository. One advantage of using the direct-to-cloud object storage Backup Job is that you can more easily leverage Instant Recovery in Any Cloud since your primary backup is in the cloud. Taking advantage of cloud transit speeds, your business can get back up and running in less time than it would take to restore back to on-premises storage.

Planning for Disaster Recovery—How You’ll Budget

Another consideration for tightening up your cyber resilience plan (and getting your executive team on board with it) is better understanding and anticipating any egress expenses you may face when recovering data—because the last thing you want to be doing in the case of a major data disaster is trying to convince your executive team to sign off on an astronomical egress bill from your cloud provider.

At Backblaze, we’ve always believed it’s good and right to enable customers to readily use their data. With B2 Reserve, our capacity-based offering, there are no egress fees, unlike those charged by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. B2 Reserve also includes premium support and Universal Data Migration services so you can move your data from another cloud provider without any lift on your team’s part.

For our Backblaze B2 pay-as-you-go consumption-based offering, egress fees stand at just $0.01/GB, and we waive egress fees altogether with many of our compute and CDN partners.

How Veeam Works with Backblaze B2

Backblaze is a Veeam Ready partner and certified Veeam Ready for Object with Immutability, meaning it’s incredibly easy to set up Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as your cloud repository in Veeam’s SOBR. In fact, it takes only about 20 minutes.

Setting up Backblaze B2 as your primary repository in the direct-to-object storage method is even easier. Just follow the steps in our Quick-Start Guide to get started.

Backblaze B2 is one-fifth the cost of other major cloud providers and offers enterprise-grade security without enterprise pricing. Unlike other cloud providers, we do not charge extra for the use of Object Lock, which enables immutability for protection from ransomware. There’s also no minimum retention requirement unlike other cloud providers who charge you for 30, 60 or even 90 days for deleted data.

No matter how you choose to configure Veeam with Backblaze B2, you’ll know that your data is protected from on-site disaster, ransomware, and hardware failure.

Veeam + Backblaze: Now Even Easier

Get started today for $5/TB per month or contact your favorite reseller, like CDW or SHI, to purchase Backblaze via B2 Reserve, our all-inclusive capacity-based bundles.

The post Thinking Through Your Cloud Strategy With Veeam’s V12 Release appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

What’s the Diff: Image-Based Backup vs. File-Based Backup

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-the-diff-image-based-backup-vs-file-based-backup/

When you’re planning your backup strategy, one important decision to make is whether to use image-based or file-based backups. Both methods have pros and cons and both are useful in different situations. Think of it like packing for a trip: Sometimes you need to take everything plus the kitchen sink (image-based), and sometimes you only need the essentials (file-based). It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it will make more sense once you understand the differences between these two backup types. Let’s dig in.

The TLDR: What’s the Difference Between Image-Based and File-Based Backups?

The short answer is this: An image-based backup (also known as a bare metal backup, which is a deeply cool name) is a backup of an entire machine or server, including the operating system (OS) and applications as well as all of the files. A file-based backup only includes the files. We’ll dig deeper into the implications of each below, but that should give you a good base of knowledge to start.

First, Some Basic Backup Best Practices

In addition to understanding the difference between file-based and image-based backups and when to use them, there are a few key elements of a backup strategy you should have in your playbook:

Want a Deeper Dive?

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Why Is Your Backup Configuration Important?

Properly configuring your backups, including when to use file-based versus image-based backups, is important for a couple reasons. First, it enables you to optimize your cloud storage usage and costs. Image-based backups are typically larger than file-based backups, so they’ll cost more to store. File-based backups are smaller and cost less to store, but they’re also not as robust. Finding the right mix is important as you’re planning your cloud storage strategy.

It’s also important to properly configure your backups so that you can recover more effectively in the case of a disaster. Restoring from an image-based backup will allow you to bring your entire operation back online. Understanding how each type of backup works will help you decide which to use when (and when you should use both).

What Is a File-Based Backup?

A file-based backup, sometimes called a file backup or a file-level backup, is a backup of a single file, multiple files, or even all the files on your system. The biggest distinction from an image-based backup is that it does not include a backup of the OS.

When configuring a file-based backup, you can choose which files you want to back up. For instance, you might choose to back up only certain file types, like Word documents or databases. Or you might choose to back up a particular set of files for one department, such as accounting files.

To understand when to use a file-based backup, it helps to know the pros and cons. We’ll dig into those next.

Advantages of File-Based Backup

File-based backups are simple and straightforward—you just need to back up files versus the entire system. Advantages of this type of backup include:

  • More control over what gets backed up. You can choose specific files or folders that get backed up or sent to cloud storage.
  • More control over what you recover. You can be more granular when it comes to choosing which files you need to restore should you need to.
  • Less storage utilization and faster backups. Since file-based backups are typically smaller in size than image-based, they take up less storage space and can be faster to run.
  • Ability to customize. Some backup applications allow you to set customized backup cadences for different types of files. For example, you could back up accounting files daily, but other project files weekly. Or, you could back up all files on a specific schedule.

Disadvantages of File-Based Backup

There are two main disadvantages of file-based backups:

  • The files are saved, but not the applications that created them. If you need to restore files to a different machine, you need to make sure that machine has all of the appropriate applications to read and use the files.
  • File-based backups are very limited in a disaster recovery scenario. If you need to restore an entire environment after a natural disaster or a ransomware attack, you would need to recover all of your files, then spend additional time reconstructing your OS, reinstalling all of your applications, reconfiguring them, etc.

What Is an Image-Based Backup?

An image-based backup, also known as a bare metal backup, disk backup, disk image backup, or mirror backup, allows you to back up all of the volumes on your server, creating a copy of your whole system.

As opposed to a file-based backup, an image-based backup backs up your entire OS, including settings, applications, configurations, and executable programs.

An image-based backup is more robust, which makes it larger. That comes with some advantages and disadvantages as well.

Advantages of Image-Based Backup

Image-based backups are comprehensive. Going back to our packing metaphor, this is the kitchen sink method. Advantages of this type of backup include:

  • The ability to restore a server in its entirety. This is great when you need to protect your entire server, including the OS.
  • The flexibility to restore individual files or the entire system. With an image-based backup, you get the same restore capabilities as a file-based backup, but with the added option to restore the entire disk if needed.
  • Faster recoveries. If you need to meet specific recovery time objectives (RTOs), image-based backups can save you time. You don’t need to reinstall and patch the OS.

Disadvantages of Image-Based Backup

There are a few disadvantages of image-based backups, including:

  • More time-consuming and bandwidth-hogging during backup. Since you’re backing up everything, image-based backups are going to take longer and use more internet bandwidth when you’re saving them to cloud storage. Backing up after work hours is typically recommended.
  • More expensive to store. Image-based backups take up more cloud storage space and hence cost more to store.
  • Could be overkill for day-to-day recovery needs. When you only need to recover a file that’s accidentally been deleted or corrupted, you don’t need a full image-based backup.

Image-Based vs. File-Based: How to Choose?

Now that you know the difference between image-based and file-based backups, how do you know when to use each type? Here are a few basic guidelines.

Choose a file-based backup for the following scenarios:

  1. If you have a virtualized environment. When you can reimage a new OS quickly in a virtualized environment, you may not want or need to back up the full OS.
  2. To back up employee workstations. Employees will most often need to restore individual files, and a file-based backup will cover this use case. If you ever needed to do a full restore, chances are good that you can just reinstall the OS easily.

Choose an image-based backup for the following scenarios:

  1. For servers with mission-critical data. If you can’t function without it, you should do a full image-based backup.
  2. For anything that would take a long time to configure. In a recovery situation, you don’t want to be spending time reconfiguring settings and reinstalling applications.

Why Not Use Both? Optimizing for Cost and Utility

Rather than choosing between file-based or image-based, you could design a backup strategy that employs both. This allows you to manage your storage usage and costs while maximizing your ability to recover quickly. For example, you could consider doing an image-based backup monthly and file-based backups more frequently. Or you could do an image-based backup of your mission critical servers and file-based backups of employee workstations. The right combination will help you to keep your costs low while maintaining the fidelity of your environment in a disaster scenario.

Storing Backups in the Cloud

Whether you choose image-based or file-based backups, you need somewhere safe to store them. According to the 3-2-1 backup strategy, one of those copies should live off-site in a geographically distant location, and cloud storage is a great fit. Check out server backup solutions from Backblaze B2 to learn more about storing your image-based and file-based backups in the cloud.

The post What’s the Diff: Image-Based Backup vs. File-Based Backup appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Back Up Veeam to the Cloud

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-back-up-veeam-to-the-cloud/

Backups are your best defense against ransomware and other types of data loss. Thankfully it is quick and easy to back up all your Veeam data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage within minutes—and we have the videos to prove it!

What is Veeam?

Veeam is well-respected backup and disaster recovery software that works across many platforms and hardware/software configurations. Founded in 2006, Veeam Software is a U.S.-based company that operates in over 180 countries and has 400,000 customers—many of them Fortune 500 companies.

The Veeam and Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Integration

Backblaze has partnered with Veeam to deliver the most reliable, affordable, and secure data protection and cloud storage target for your data. Veeam Backup & Replication provides modern data protection for your cloud, virtual, and physical workloads to solve your challenges around backup, recovery, archive, disaster recovery, and ransomware.

With a transparent pricing model that is a fraction of the competitors’ cost, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage helps you plan your budget effectively and store more than four times the restore points you could otherwise. With Backblaze B2 as your cloud tier storage destination in Veeam, you can store your data for $5/TB per month with no minimum retention requirement, tiers, or hidden fees.

Additionally, Backblaze is certified as Veeam Ready—Object and Veeam Ready—Object with Immutability. Immutability is an important part of protecting backups from threats such as ransomware or stolen credentials because it allows you to protect objects from being changed, deleted, manipulated, copied, or encrypted for a specified, user-defined time period. Even better, Backblaze does not charge an extra fee for the use of the object lock feature.

How Does Veeam Work with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage?

Backblaze is a proud partner of Veeam and is fully compatible with Veeam Cloud Tier. Using Backblaze B2’s S3-compatible API, you can set B2 Cloud Storage as your Cloud Tier in Veeam’s Scale-Out Backup Repository.

In Veeam v11 and earlier versions, you must first establish the Performance Tier, or Local Repository, before you can set up the Cloud Tier.

If you’ve been using Veeam, you probably already know how to add a local storage repository to Veeam. However, if you are one of our B2 users who are exploring this partnership for the first time, we have a video to guide you through the process. Watch as Greg Hamer, Senior Developer Evangelist, demonstrates how to set up the Local Repository in just a few minutes. If your Local Repository is already configured, then you’re ready to proceed to cloud backup!

Steps to Back Up Your Data with Veeam and Cloud Storage

To make things easy, we have created a video about How to Back Up Veeam to the Cloud. In the video, Greg demonstrates how you can securely store your Veeam data in just 20 minutes.

If you’re not a visual learner, you can easily back up all of your Veeam data to Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage using the five easy steps below.

Step 1: Create a Backblaze Account

First, you need to set up a Backblaze account. If you already have a Backblaze account, you’re all set and can move on to step two. Otherwise, visit Backblaze’s Veeam page and click the Start Now button to create one.

The Start Now button will take you to a simple sign-up form where you only have to enter your email address and a password. Don’t worry about setting up billing just yet. You have 10GB of free space to test drive B2 Cloud Storage before you have to set up any billing information.

Once you successfully create a new account, you will create a bucket to store your data in, then collect and save some information from your Backblaze dashboard to use later.

Step 2: Create a Backblaze B2 Bucket and Set Up an Application Key

A “bucket” is a container that holds your files uploaded by your Veeam software to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. When configuring your bucket, you will give it a unique name, choose whether it’s private or public (most customers choose private buckets), and turn on Object Lock to secure your files and make them immutable. (This is an important security step you won’t want to miss.)

Each bucket is associated with a name and an S3 Endpoint. You should jot down this Endpoint to use later in Veeam to connect with Backblaze.

Before you exit the Backblaze console, you will set up an Application Key that allows Veeam to connect to and access your storage bucket securely. You give the Application Key a name and make some additional choices to finish setting it up. Finally, you will jot down some details for the Application Key, such as keyID, keyName, and applicationKey, which is essentially a passcode for the key. Be sure to write these down immediately after creating the key, or you won’t be able to access it in plaintext again.

Step 3: Add Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as a Cloud Tier Repository in Veeam

Switching over to the Veeam console, you will log into your software and create a Cloud Tier repository to interface with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Before you do that, however, you need to have a local repository created. The tutorial assumes that you have one already and have been using Veeam to backup locally.

To set up your cloud tier, you will follow a few simple steps:

  1. Choose your object storage type.
  2. Give it a name.
  3. Enter your Backblaze S3 Endpoint value.

You will also be prompted to enter your credentials, which is the Application Key information you’ve already set up when you created your Backblaze B2 Bucket. Before exiting that area, Veeam will test the connection to ensure it can reach your Bucket. The final stage in this step allows you to turn on Object Lock to keep your backup files safe.

Step 4: Create the Scale-Out Backup Repository in Veeam

Still working within the Veeam console, you will also set up a scale-out repository to handle backup data load. During this step, you will name your Veeam Scale-Out repository, choose a few options, select the Cloud Tier repository you just created in step three, and ensure that your files are backed up immediately.

Step 5: Create a Backup Job in Veeam

The final stage of our backup tutorial walks you through the process of setting up a backup job. You will continue working in Veeam to create a new backup job using cloud storage. In the video we show you a Virtual Machine backup, but you can create several other types of backup jobs as needed. You can then name your backup job, add the files you want to backup, and choose where you want to save them (in this case, the Scale-Out repository we just created).

You also have options to optimize storage and schedule your backup job to run as often as you like. Then, you can test it immediately to see how it goes.

We hope this video guide and brief explanation were useful in helping you get the most out of both Veeam and Backblaze. If you have thoughts for topics on future videos, sound off in the comments. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more great content!

The post How to Back Up Veeam to the Cloud appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Server Backup 101: Disaster Recovery Planning

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/server-backup-101-disaster-recovery-planning/

In any business, time is money. What may shock you is how much money that time is actually worth. According to Gartner, the average cost of one hour of downtime for a business is roughly $300,000. That’s $5,600 a minute. Multiply that out by the amount of time it takes to recover from data theft, sabotage, or a natural disaster, and you could easily be looking at millions of dollars in lost revenue. That is, unless you’ve planned ahead with an effective disaster recovery plan.

Even one hour of lost time due to a cyberattack or natural disaster could adversely affect your business operations. Read on to learn how to develop an effective disaster recovery plan so you can quickly rebound no matter what happens, including:

  • Knowing what a disaster recovery plan is and why you need it.
  • Developing an effective strategy.
  • Identifying key roles.
  • Prioritizing business operations and objectives.
  • Deploying backups.
Check out the other posts in our Server Backup 101 series:

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is made up of resources and processes that a business can use to restore apps, data, digital assets, equipment, and network operations in the event of any unplanned disruption.

Events such as natural disasters (floods, fires, earthquakes, etc.), theft, and cybercrime often interrupt business operations or restrict access to data. The goal of a disaster recovery plan is to get back up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Some companies will choose to write their own disaster recovery plans, while others may contract with a managed service provider (MSP) specializing in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Either way, crafting a disaster recovery plan that covers you for any contingency is crucial.

Why Do You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is not just a good idea, it is an essential component of your business. Cybercrime is on the rise, targeting small and medium-sized businesses just as often as large corporations. According to Cybersecurity Magazine, 43% of recent data breaches affected small and medium-sized businesses. Additionally, you could be cut off from your data by power outages, hardware failure, data corruption, and natural occurrences that restrict IT workflows. So, why do you need a disaster recovery plan? A few key benefits rise to the top:

  • Your disaster recovery plan will ensure business continuity in the case of a disaster. Imagine the confidence of knowing that no matter what happens, your business is prepared and can continue operations seamlessly.
  • An effective disaster recovery plan will help you get back up and running faster and more efficiently.
  • The plan also helps to communicate to your entire team, from top to bottom, what to do in the event of an emergency.

Writing a Disaster Recovery Plan: What Should Your Disaster Recovery Plan Include?

A solid disaster recovery plan should include five main elements, which we’ll detail below:

  1. An effective strategy.
  2. Key team members who can carry out the plan.
  3. Clear objectives and priorities.
  4. Solid backups.
  5. Testing protocols.

An Effective Strategy

One of the most critical aspects of your disaster recovery plan should be your strategy. Typically, the details of a disaster recovery plan include steps for prevention, preparation, mitigation, and recovery. Think about both the big picture and fine details when putting together the pieces.

Disaster Recovery Planning Case Study: Santa Cruz Skateboards

Santa Cruz Skateboards safeguarded decades worth of data with a disaster recovery plan and backups to prevent loss from the threat of tsunamis on the California coast. Read more about how they did it.

Some tips for creating an effective strategy include:

  • Identify possible disasters. Consider the types of disasters your business may encounter and design your plan around those. Every business is susceptible to cybercrime, which should be a significant component of your plan. If your business is located in a disaster prone location, let that dictate your plan objectives.
  • Plan for “minor” disasters. A “major” disaster like an earthquake could take out the entire office and on-premises infrastructure, but “minor” disasters can also be disruptive. Good employees make mistakes and delete things, and bad employees sometimes make worse mistakes. A disaster recovery plan protects you from those “minor” disasters as well.
  • Create multiple disaster recovery plans. You may need to create different versions of your disaster recovery plan based on specific scenarios and the severity of the disaster. For example, you may need a plan that responds to a cyberattack and restores data quickly, while another plan may deal with hardware destruction and replacement rather than data restoration.
  • Plan from your recovery backward. Think about what you need to accomplish with your disaster recovery and plan your backup routine to support it. Then, after your plan is written, go back and ensure that your backup routine follows the plan initiatives and accomplishes the goals in an acceptable time frame.
  • Develop KPIs. Include critical key performance indicators (KPIs) in the plan, such as a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). RTO refers to how quickly you intend to restore your systems after a disaster, and RPO is the maximum amount of data loss you can safely incur.

Establish the Key Team Members and Their Roles and Hierarchy

Another crucial component of your disaster recovery plan is identifying key team members to carry out the instructions. You must clearly define roles and hierarchy for effectiveness. Consider the following when building your disaster recovery team:

  • Communicate roles and hierarchy. Ensure that each team member knows their role in the plan and understands where they land in the hierarchy. Build in redundancy if a major player is unavailable.
  • Develop a master contact list. Create a master list with updated contact information for each team member and update it regularly as things change. Be sure the list includes everyone’s cell phone and landline numbers (if applicable) and emergency contacts for each person. Don’t assume you will have working internet and consider alternative ways to reach critical team members in the middle of the night.
  • Plan on how to manage your team. Think about how you will stay organized and manage your team to function 24/7 until you resolve the disaster.

Prioritize Business Operations and Objectives

Another important aspect of your disaster recovery plan is prioritizing business operations and objectives and crafting your plan around those.

Identify the most critical aspects of the business that need to be restored first. Then, focus on those and leave the less essential things until later. Understand that it is not feasible to restore everything at once. Instead, you must prioritize the most critical business areas and get those up and running and then, other, less crucial parts of the system. Detail these priorities in your plan so that no one wastes time on nonessential operations.

Know How to Deploy Your Backups

Backups should be a routine function for your organization, and you should know them inside and out. Be sure to familiarize yourself with every aspect of the backup process, including where data is stored, how recent it is, and how to restore it at a moment’s notice.

Having a reliable backup plan could save your business. You don’t want to waste precious time figuring out where the latest backup is, where it’s stored (whether that’s locally or on the cloud), or how to access it. Off-site cloud storage is a safe, reliable way to store and retrieve your data, especially in the event of a disaster.

Practice restoring your backups regularly to test their viability. Document the process for restoring in case you are unavailable and someone else has to take over. Data restoration should be a central part of your disaster recovery plan. Remember, backups are not your entire disaster recovery plan but only a piece of the overall system.

Foolproof Your Plan With Disaster Recovery Testing

The best-laid plans don’t always work out. Therefore, it’s essential that you foolproof your disaster recovery plan by testing it regularly (once a year, or every six months, whatever works for you). You don’t have to experience a real catastrophe; you can simulate what a disaster would look like and run through the entire process to ensure everything works as expected. Some disaster recovery testing best practices include:

  • Planning for the worst-case scenario. Think about things like access to a car, how you will get to the office, and how you will access your backups if they are stored online and you don’t have internet? Prepare by having multiple alternate plans (A, B, C, etc.). Remember, disasters come in all shapes and sizes so, be prepared to think outside the box. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, businesses had to scramble to adjust. Prepare for anything, even minor disruptions or cut-offs from resources you rely on.
  • Securing resources in advance. If you need resources to make it work, such as budgetary funds, software, hardware, or services, get those approved now so you’re not stuck provisioning necessary resources in the middle of a disaster.
  • Regularly reviewing and updating your disaster recovery plan as things change. Team members come and go, so schedule routine updates every three to six months to ensure that everything is up to date and viable.
  • Distributing copies of your disaster recovery plan. All staff members, including executives, should have a copy of your plan, and you should clearly communicate how it works and what everyone’s responsibility is.
  • Conducting post mortems after training and simulations (or a real disaster) to determine what works and what doesn’t. Make changes to your plan accordingly.

Don’t wait until a disaster occurs before writing your disaster recovery plan. A disaster recovery plan is an ever-evolving process you must maintain as the business changes and grows so you can face anything that the future brings.

Disaster Recovery, Done.

Ready to check disaster recovery off your list? Check out our Instant Recovery in Any Cloud solution that you can use as part of your disaster recovery plan. You can run a single command to instantly see your servers, data, firewalls, and network storage. Get back up and running as soon as possible with minimal disruption and expense to your business.

The post Server Backup 101: Disaster Recovery Planning appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Server Backup 101: Developing a Server Backup Strategy

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/server-backup-101-developing-a-server-backup-strategy/

In business, data loss is unavoidable unless you have good server backups. Files get deleted accidentally, servers crash, computers fail, and employees make mistakes.

However, those aren’t the only dangers. You could also lose your company data in a natural disaster or cybersecurity attack. Ransomware is a serious concern for small to medium-sized businesses as well as large enterprises. Smart companies plan ahead to avoid data loss.

This post will discuss server backup basics, the different types of server backup, why it’s critical to keep your data backed up, and how to create a solid backup strategy for your company. Read on to learn everything you ever wanted to know about server backups.

Check out the other posts in our Server Backup 101 series:

First Things First: What Is a Server?

A server is a virtual or physical device that performs a function to support other computers and users. Sometimes servers are dedicated machines used for a single purpose, and sometimes they serve multiple functions. Other computers or devices that connect to the server are called “clients.” Typically, clients use special software to communicate with the server and reply to requests. This communication is referred to as the server/client model. Some common uses for this setup include:

  • Web Server: Hosts web pages and online applications.
  • Email Server: Manages email for a company.
  • Database Server: Hosts various databases and controls access.
  • Application Server: Allows users to share applications.
  • File Server: Used to host files shared on a network.
  • DNS Server: Used to decode web addresses and deliver the user to the correct address.
  • FTP Server: Used specifically for hosting files for shared use.
  • Proxy Server: Adds a layer of security between client and server.

Servers run on many operating systems (OS) such as Windows, Linux, Mac, Apache, Unix, NetWare, and FreeBSD. The OS handles access control, user connections, memory allocation, and network functions. Each OS offers varying degrees of control, security, flexibility, and scalability.

Why It’s Important to Back Up Your Server

Did you know that roughly 40% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will be attacked by cybercriminals within a year, and 61% of all SMBs have already been attacked? Additionally, statistics show that 93% of companies that lost data for more than 10 days were forced into bankruptcy within a year. More than half of them filed immediately, and most shut down.

Company data is vulnerable to fire, theft, natural disasters, hardware failure, and cybercrime. Backups are an essential prevention tool.

Types of Servers

Within the realm of servers, there are many different types for virtually any purpose and environment. However, the primary function of most servers is data storage and processing. Some examples of servers include:

  • Physical Servers: These are hardware devices (usually computers) that connect users, share resources, and control access.
  • Virtual Servers: Using special software (called a hypervisor), you can set up multiple virtual servers on one physical machine. Each server acts like a physical server while the hypervisor manages memory and allocates other system resources as needed.
  • Hybrid Servers: Hybrids are servers combining physical servers and virtual servers. They offer the speed and efficiency of a physical server combined with the flexibility of cloud-hosted resources.
  • NAS Devices: Network-attached storage (NAS) devices store data and are accessed directly through the network without first connecting to a computer. These hardware devices contain a storage drive, processor, and OS, and can be accessed remotely.
  • SAN Server: Although not technically a server, a storage area network (SAN) connects multiple storage devices to multiple servers expanding the network and controlling connections.
  • Cloud Servers: Cloud servers exist in a virtual online environment, and you can access them through web portals, applications, and specialized software.

Regardless of how you save your data and where, backups are essential to protecting yourself from loss.

How to Back Up a Server

You have options for backing up data, and the methods vary. First, let’s talk about terminology.

Backup vs. Archive

Backing up is copying your data, whereas an archive is a historical copy that you keep for retention purposes, often for long periods. Archives are typically used to save old, inactive data for compliance reasons.

Here are two examples that illustrate backups vs. an archives. An example of a backup is when your mobile phone backs up to the cloud, and if you factory reset the phone, you can restore all your applications, settings, and data from the backup copy. An example of an archive is a tape backup of old HR files that have long since been deleted from the server.

Backup vs. Sync

Sometimes people confuse the word backup with sync. They are not the same thing. A backup is a copy of your data you can use to restore lost files. Syncing is the automatic updating and merging of two file sources. Cloud computing often uses syncing to keep files in one location identical to files in another.

To prevent data loss, backups are the process to use. Syncing overwrites files with the latest version; a backup can restore back to a single point in time, so you don’t lose anything valuable.

Backup Destinations

When selecting a backup destination, you have many mediums to choose from. There are pros and cons for each type. Some popular backup destinations and their pros and cons are as follows:

Destination Pros Cons
External Media (USB, CD, Removable Hard Drives, Flash Drives, etc.) Quick, easy, affordable. Fragile if dropped, crushed, or exposed to magnets; very small capacity.
NAS Always available on the network, small size, and great for SMBs. Vulnerable to on-premises threats and non-scalable due to limits.
Network or SAN Storage High speed, view connected drives as local, good security, failover protection, excellent disk utilization, and high-end disaster recovery options. Can be expensive, doesn’t work with all types of servers, and is vulnerable to attacks on the network.
Tape Dependable (robust, not fragile), can be kept for years, low cost, and simple to replicate. High initial setup costs, limited scalability, potential media corruption over time, and time consuming to manage.
FTP Excellent for large files, copy multiple files at once, can resume if the connection is lost, schedule backups and recover lost data. No security, vendors vary widely, not all solutions include encryption, and vulnerable to attacks.
File-sharing Services (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc.) Quick and easy to use; inexpensive. Great for collaborating and sharing data. Most file-sharing services use file syncing rather than a true cloud backup.

Cloud backups are an altogether different type of backup; typically, you have two options available: all-in-one tools or integrated solutions.

All-in-one Tools

All-in-one tools like Carbonite Safe, Carbonite Server, Acronis, IDrive, CrashPlan, and SpiderOak combine both the backup software and the backend cloud storage in one offering. They have the ability to back up entire operating systems, files, images, videos, and sometimes even mobile device data. Depending on the tool you choose, you may be able to back up an unlimited number of devices, or you may have limits. However, most of these all-in-one solutions are expensive and can be complex to use. All those bells and whistles often come at a price—a steep learning curve.

Integrated Solutions (Backup Software Paired With Cloud Storage)

Pairing software and cloud storage is another option that combines the best of both worlds. It allows users to choose the software they want with the features they need and fast, reliable cloud storage. Cloud storage is scalable, so you will never run out of space as your business grows. Using your chosen software, it’s fast and easy to restore your files. Although it may seem counterintuitive, it’s often more affordable to use two integrated solutions versus an all-in-one tool. Another big bonus of using cloud storage is that it integrates with many popular software options. For example, Backblaze works seamlessly with:

An important factor to consider when choosing the right backup software and cloud storage is compatibility. Research which platforms your software will back up and what types of backups it offers (file, image, system, etc.). You also need to think about the restore process and your options (e.g., file, folder, bare metal/image, virtual, etc.). User-friendliness is important when deciding. Some programs like rClone require a working knowledge of command line. Choose a software program that is best for you.

Think about scalability and how much storage it can handle now and in the future as your business grows. A few other things to consider are pricing, security, and support. Your backup files are no good if they are vulnerable to attack. Compare prices and check out the support options before making your final decision.

Creating a Solid Backup Strategy

A solid backup strategy is the best way to protect your company against data loss. Again, you have options. The 3-2-1 strategy is the gold standard, but some companies are choosing options like a 3-2-1-1-0 option or even a 4-3-2 scheme. Learn more about how each plan works.

Before determining your strategy, you must consider what data you need to back up. For example, will you be backing up just servers or also workstations and dedicated servers, such as email servers or SaaS data devices?

Another concern is how you will get your data into the cloud. You need to figure out which method will work best for you. You have the option of direct transfer over internet bandwidth or using a rapid ingest device (e.g., the Backblaze Fireball rapid ingest device).

Universal Data Migration

Migrating your data can seem like an insurmountable task. We launched our Universal Data Migration service to make migrating to Backblaze just as easy as it is to use Backblaze. You can migrate from virtually any source to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and it’s free to new customers who have 10TB of data or more to migrate with a one-year commitment.

How Often Should You Back Up Your Data?

Should you run full backups regularly? Or rely on incremental backups? The answer is that both have their place.

To fully protect yourself, performing regular full backups and keeping them safe is essential. Full backups can be scheduled for slow times or performed overnight when no one is using the data. Remember that full backups take the longest to complete and are the costliest but the easiest to restore.

A full backup backs up the entire server. An incremental backup only backs up files that have changed or been added since the last backup, saving storage space. The cadence of full versus incremental backups might look different for each organization. Learn more about full vs. incremental, differential, and full synthetic backups.

How Long Should You Keep Your Previous Backups?

You also must consider how long you want to keep your previous backups. Will you keep them for a specific amount of time and overwrite older backups?

By overwriting the files, you can save space, but you may not have an old enough backup when you need it. Also, keep in mind that many cloud storage vendors have minimum retention policies for deleted files. While “retention” sounds like a good thing, in this case it’s not. They might be charging you for data storage for 30, 60, or even 90 days even if you deleted it after storing it for just one day. That may also factor into your decision about how long you should keep your previous backup files. Some experts recommend three months, but that may not be enough in some situations.

You need to keep full backups for as long as you might need to recover from various issues. If, for example, you are infiltrated by a cybercriminal and don’t discover it for two months, will your oldest backup be enough to restore your system back to a clean state?

Another question to think about is if you’ll keep an archive. As a refresher, an archive is a backup of historical data that you keep long-term even if the files have already been deleted from the server. Most sources say you should plan to keep archives forever unless you have no use for the data in the future, but your company might have a different appetite for retention timeframes. Forever probably seems like…well, a long time, but keep in mind that the security of having those files available may be worth it.

How Will You Monitor Your Backup?

It’s not enough to just schedule your backups and walk away. You need to monitor them to ensure they are occurring on schedule. You should also test your ability to restore and fully understand the options you have for restoring your data. A backup is only as good as its ability to restore. You must test this out periodically to ensure you have a solid disaster recovery plan in place.

Special Considerations for Backing Up

When backing up servers with different operating systems, you need to consider the constraints of that system. For example, SQL servers can handle differential backups, whereas other servers cannot. Some backup software like Veeam integrates easily with all the major operating systems and therefore supports backups of multiple servers using different platforms.

If you are backing up a single server, things are easy. You have only one OS to worry about. However, if you are backing up multiple servers with different platforms and applications running on them, things could get more complex. Be sure to research all your options and use a vendor that can easily handle groups management and SaaS-managed backup services so that you can view all your data through a single pane of glass. You want consolidation and easy delineation if you need to pinpoint a single system to restore. You can use groups to easily manage different servers with similar operating systems to keep things organized and streamline your backup strategy.

As you can see, there are many facets to server backups, and you have options. If you have questions or want to learn more about Backblaze backup solutions, contact us today. Or, click here if you’re ready to get started backing up your server.

The post Server Backup 101: Developing a Server Backup Strategy appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Server Backup 101: On-premises vs. Cloud-only vs. Hybrid Backup Strategies

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/server-backup-101-on-premises-vs-cloud-only-vs-hybrid-backup-strategies/

As an IT leader or business owner, establishing a solid, working backup strategy is one of the most important tasks on your plate. Server backups are an essential part of a good security and disaster recovery stance. One decision you’re faced with as part of setting up that strategy is where and how you’ll store server backups: on-premises, in the cloud, or in some mix of the two.

As the cloud has become more secure, affordable, and accessible, more organizations are using a hybrid cloud strategy for their cloud computing needs, and server backups are particularly well suited to this strategy. It allows you to maintain existing on-premises infrastructure while taking advantage of the scalability, affordability, and geographic separation offered by the cloud.

If you’re confused about how to set up a hybrid cloud strategy for backups, you’re not alone. There are as many ways to approach it as there are companies backing up to the cloud. Today, we’re discussing different server backup approaches to help you architect a hybrid server backup strategy that fits your business.

Server Backup Destinations

Learning about different backup destinations can help administrators craft better backup policies and procedures to ensure the safety of your data for the long term. When structuring your server backup strategy, you essentially have three choices for where to store data: on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment that uses both. First, though, let’s explain what a hybrid environment truly is.

Refresher: What Is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud refers to a cloud environment made up of both private cloud resources (typically on-premises, although they don’t have to be) and public cloud resources with some kind of orchestration between them. Let’s define private and public clouds:

  • A public cloud essentially lives in a data center that’s used by many different tenants and maintained by a third-party company. Tenants share the same physical hardware, and their data is virtually separated so one tenant can’t access another tenant’s data.
  • A private cloud is dedicated to a single tenant. Private clouds are traditionally thought of as on-premises. Your company provisions and maintains the infrastructure needed to run the cloud at your office. Now, though, you can rent rackspace or even private, dedicated servers in a data center, so a private cloud can be off-premises, but it’s still dedicated only to your company.

Hybrid clouds are defined by a combined management approach, which means they have some type of orchestration between the public and private cloud that allows data to move between them as demands, needs, and costs change, giving businesses greater flexibility and more options for data deployment and use.

Here are some examples of different server backup destinations according to where your data is located:

  • Local backup destinations.
  • Cloud-only backups.
  • Hybrid cloud backups.

Local Backup Destinations

On-premises backup, also known as a local backup, is the process of backing up your system, applications, and other data to a local device. Tape and network-attached storage (NAS) are examples of common local backup solutions.

  • Tape: With tape backup, data is copied from its primary storage location to a tape cartridge using a tape drive. Tape creates a physical air gap, meaning there’s a literal gap of air between the data on the tape and the network—they are not connected in any way. This makes tape a highly secure option, but it comes at a cost. Tape requires physical storage space some businesses may not have. Tape maintenance and management can be very time consuming. And tapes can degrade, resulting in data loss.
  • NAS: NAS is a type of storage device that is connected to a network to allow data processing and storage through a secure, centralized location. With NAS, authorized users can access stored data from anywhere with a browser and a LAN connection. NAS is flexible, relatively easy to scale, and cost-effective.

Cloud-only Backups

Cloud-only backup strategies are becoming more commonplace as startups take a cloud-native approach and existing companies undergo digital transformations. A cloud-only backup strategy involves eliminating local, on-premises backups and sending files and databases to the cloud vendor for storage. It’s still a great idea to keep a local copy of your backup so you comply with a 3-2-1 backup strategy (more on that below). You could also utilize multiple cloud vendors or multiple regions with the same vendor to ensure redundancy. In the event of an outage, your data is stored safely in a separate cloud or a different cloud region and can easily be restored.

With services like Cloud Replication, companies can easily achieve a solid cloud-only server backup solution within the same cloud vendor’s infrastructure. It’s also possible to orchestrate redundancy between two different cloud vendors in a multi-cloud strategy.

Hybrid Cloud Backups

When you hear the term “hybrid” when it comes to servers, you might initially think about a combination of on-premises and cloud data. That’s typically what people think of when they imagine a hybrid cloud, but as we mentioned earlier, a hybrid cloud is a combination of a public cloud and a private cloud. Today, private clouds can live off-premises, but for our purposes, we’ll consider private clouds as being on-premises. A hybrid server backup strategy is an easy way to accomplish a 3-2-1 backup strategy, generally considered the gold standard when it comes to backups.

Refresher: What Is the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy?

The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a tried and tested way to keep your data accessible, yet safe. It includes:

  • 3: Keep three copies of any important file—one primary and two backups.
  • 2: Keep the files on two different media types to protect against different types of hazards.
  • 1: Store one copy off-site.

A hybrid server backup strategy can be helpful for fulfilling this sage backup advice as it provides two backup locations, one in the private cloud and one in the public cloud.

Choosing a Backup Strategy

Choosing a backup strategy that is right for you involves carefully evaluating your existing systems and your future goals. Can you get there with your current backup strategy? What if a ransomware or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack affected your organization tomorrow? Decide what gaps need to be filled and take into consideration a few more crucial points:

  • Evaluate your vulnerabilities. Is your location susceptible to a local data disaster? How often do you think you might need to access your backups? How quickly would you need them?
  • Price. Various backup strategies will incur costs for hardware, service, expansions, and more. Carefully evaluate your organization’s finances to decide on a budget. And keep in mind that monthly fees and service charges may go up over time as you add more storage or use enhanced backup tools.
  • Storage capacity. How much storage capacity do you have on-site? How much data does your business generate over a given period of time? Do you have IT personnel to manage on-premises systems?
  • Access to hardware. Provisioning a private cloud on-premises involves purchasing hardware. Increasing supply chain issues can slow down factories, so be mindful of shortages and increased delivery times.
  • Scalability. As your organization grows, it’s likely that your data backup needs will grow, too. If you’re projecting growth, choose a data backup strategy that can keep up with rapidly expanding backup needs.

Backup Strategy Pros and Cons

Local Backup Strategy

  • Pros: A major benefit to using a local backup strategy is that organizations have fast access to data backups in case of emergencies. Backing up to NAS can also be faster locally depending on the size of your data set.
  • Cons: Maintaining on-premises hardware can be costly, but more important, your data is at a higher risk of loss from local disasters like floods, fires, or theft.

Cloud Backup Strategy

  • Pros: With a cloud-only backup strategy, there is no need for on-site hardware, and backup and recovery can be initiated from any location. Cloud resources are inherently scalable, so the stress of budgeting for and provisioning hardware is gone.
  • Cons: A cloud-only strategy is susceptible to outages if your data is consolidated with one vendor, however this risk can be mitigated by diversifying vendors and regions within the same vendor. Similarly, if your network goes down, then you won’t have access to your data.

Hybrid Cloud Backup Strategy

  • Pros: Hybrid cloud server backup strategies combine the best features of public and private clouds: You have fast access to your data locally while protecting your data from disaster by adding an off-site location to your backup strategy.
  • Cons: Setting up and running a private cloud server can be very costly. Businesses also need to plan their backup strategy a bit more thoughtfully because they must decide what to keep in a public cloud versus a private cloud or on local storage.

Hybrid Server Backup Considerations

Once you’ve decided a hybrid server backup strategy is right for you, there are many ways you can structure it. Here are just a few examples:

  • Keep backups of active working files on-premises and move all archives to the cloud.
  • Choose a cutover date if your business is ready to move mostly to the cloud going forward. All backups and archives prior to the cutover date could remain on-premises and everything after the cutover date gets stored in cloud storage.
  • Store all incremental backups in cloud storage and keep all full backups and archives stored locally. Or, following the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) approach, put the father and son backups in the cloud and grandfather backups in local storage. (Or vice versa.)

As you’re structuring your server backup strategy, consider any GDPR, HIPAA, or cybersecurity requirements. Does it call for off-site, air-gapped backups? If so, you may want to move that data (like customer or patient records) to the cloud and keep other, non-regulated data local. Some industries, particularly government and heavily regulated industries, may require you to keep some data in a private cloud.

Ready to get started? Back up your server using our joint solution with MSP360 or get started with Veeam or any one of our many other integrations.

The post Server Backup 101: On-premises vs. Cloud-only vs. Hybrid Backup Strategies appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Server Backup 101: Choosing a Server Backup Solution

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/server-backup-101-choosing-a-server-backup-solution/

If you’re in charge of backups for your company, you know backing up your server is a critical task to protect important business data from data disasters like fires, floods, and ransomware attacks. You also likely know that digital transformation is pushing innovation forward with server backup solutions that live in the cloud.

Whether you operate in the cloud, on-premises, or with a hybrid environment, finding a server backup solution that meets your needs helps you keep your data and your business safe and secure.

This guide explains the various server backup solutions available both on-premises and in the cloud, and how to choose the right backup solution for you. Read on to learn more about choosing the right server backup solution for your needs.

On-premises Solutions for Server Backup

On-premises solutions store data on servers in an in-house data center managed and maintained internally. Although there has been a dramatic shift from on-premises to cloud server solutions, many organizations choose to operate their legacy systems on-premises alone or in conjunction with the cloud in a hybrid environment.

LTO/Tape

Linear tape-open (LTO) backup is the process of copying data from primary storage to a tape cartridge. If the hard disk crashes, the tapes will still hold a copy of the data.

Pros:

  • High capacity.
  • Tapes can last a long time.
  • Provides a physical air gap between backups and the network to protect against threats like ransomware.

Cons:

  • Up-front CapEx expense.
  • Tape drives must be monitored and maintained to ensure they are functioning properly.
  • Tapes take up lots of physical space.
  • Tape is susceptible to degradation over time.
  • The process of backing up to tape can be time consuming for high volumes of data.

NAS

Network-attached storage (NAS) enables multiple users and devices to store and back up data through a secure server. Anyone connected to a LAN can access the storage through a browser-based utility. It’s essentially an extra network strictly for storing data that users can access via its attached network device.

Pros:

  • Faster to restore files and access backups than tape backups.
  • More digitally intuitive and straightforward to navigate.
  • Comes with built-in backup and sync features.
  • Can connect and back up multiple computers and endpoints via the network.

Cons:

  • Requires physical maintenance and periodic drive replacement.
  • Each appliance has a limited storage capacity.
  • Because it’s connected to your network, it is also vulnerable to network attacks.

Local Server Backup

Putting your backup files on the same server or a storage server is not recommended for business applications. Still, many people choose to organize their backup storage on the same server the data runs on.

Pros:

  • Highly local.
  • Quick and easy to access.

Cons:

  • Generally less secure.
  • Capacity-limited.
  • Susceptible to malware, ransomware, and viruses.

Including these specific backup destinations, there are some pros to using on-premises backup solutions in general. For example, you might still be able to access backup files without an internet connection using on-premises solutions. And you can expect a fast restore if you have large amounts of data to recover.

However, all on-premises backup storage solutions are vulnerable to natural disasters, fires, and water damage despite your best efforts. While some methods like tape are naturally air-gapped, solutions like NAS are not. Even with a layered approach to data protection, NAS leaves a business susceptible to attacks.

Backing Up to Cloud Storage

Many organizations choose a cloud-based server for backup storage instead of or in addition to an on-premises solution (more on using both on-premises and cloud solutions together later) as they continue to integrate modern digital tools. While an on-premises system refers to data hardware and physical storage solutions, cloud storage lives “in the cloud.”

A cloud server is a virtual server that is hosted in a cloud provider’s data center. “The cloud” refers to the virtual servers users access through web browsers, APIs, CLIs, and SaaS applications and the databases that run on the servers themselves.

Because cloud providers manage the server’s physical location and hardware, organizations aren’t responsible for managing costly data centers. Even small businesses that can’t afford internal infrastructure can outsource data management, backup, and cloud storage from providers.

Pros

  • Highly scalable since companies can add as much storage as needed without ever running out of space.
  • Typically far less expensive than on-premises backup solutions because there’s no need to pay for dedicated IT staff, hardware upgrades or repair, or the space and electricity needed to run an on-premises system.
  • Builds resilience from natural disasters with off-site storage.
  • Virtual air-gapped protection may be available.
  • Fast recovery times in most cases.

Cons

  • Cloud storage fees can add up depending on the amount of storage your organization requires and the company you choose. Things like egress fees, minimum retention policies, and complicated pricing tiers can cause headaches later, so much so that there are companies dedicated to helping you decipher your AWS bill, for example.
  • Can require high bandwidth for initial deployment, however solutions like Universal Data Migration are making deployment and migrations easier.
  • Since backups can be accessed via API, they can be vulnerable to attacks without a feature like Object Lock.

It can be tough to choose between cloud storage vs. on-premises storage for backing up critical data. Many companies choose a hybrid cloud backup solution that involves both on-premises and cloud storage backup processes. Cloud backup providers often work with companies that want to build a hybrid cloud environment to run business applications and store data backups in case of a cyber attack, natural disaster, or hardware failure.

If you’re stuck between choosing an on-premises or cloud storage backup solution, a hybrid cloud option might be a good fit.

A hybrid cloud strategy combines a private, typically on-premises, cloud with a public cloud.

All-in-one vs. Integrated Solutions

When it comes to cloud backup solutions, there are two main types: all-in-one and integrated solutions.

Let’s talk about the differences between the two:

All-in-one Tools

All-in-one tools are cloud backup solutions that include both the backup application software and the cloud storage where backups will be stored. Instead of purchasing multiple products and deploying them separately, all-in-one tools allow users to deploy cloud storage with backup features together.

Pros:

  • No need for additional software.
  • Simple, out-of-the-box deployment.
  • Creates a seamless native environment.

Cons:

  • Some all-in-one tools sacrifice granularity for convenience, meaning they may not fit every use case.
  • They can be more costly than pairing cloud storage with backup software.

Integrated Solutions

Integrated solutions are pure cloud storage providers that offer cloud storage infrastructure without built-in backup software. An integrated solution means that organizations have to bring their own backup application that integrates with their chosen cloud provider.

Pros:

  • Mix and match your cloud storage and backup vendors to create a tailored server backup solution.
  • More control over your environment.
  • More control over your spending.

Cons:

  • Requires identifying and contracting with more than one provider.
  • Can require more technical expertise than with an all-in-one solution, but many cloud storage providers and backup software providers have existing integrations to make onboarding seamless.

How to Choose a Cloud Storage Solution

Choosing the best cloud storage solution for your organization involves careful consideration. There are several types of solutions available, each with unique capabilities. You don’t need the most expensive solution with bells and whistles. All you need to do is find the solution that fits your business model and future goals.

However, there are five main features that every organization seeking object storage in the cloud should look out for:

Cost

Cost is always a top concern for adopting new processes and tools in any business setting. Before choosing a cloud storage solution, take note of any fees or file size requirements for retention, egress, and data retrieval. Costs can vary significantly between storage providers, so be sure to check pricing details.

Ease-of-use and Onboarding Support

Adopting a new digital tool may also require a bit of a learning curve. Choosing a solution that supports your OS and is easy to use can help speed up the adoption rate. Check to see if there are data transfer options or services that can help you migrate more effectively. Not only should cloud storage be simple to use, but easy to deploy as well.

Security and Recovery Capabilities

Most object storage cloud solutions come with security and recovery capabilities. For example, you may be looking for a provider with Object Lock capabilities to protect data from ransomware or a simple way to implement disaster recovery protocols with a single command. Otherwise, you should check if the security specs meet your needs.

Integrations

All organizations seeking cloud storage solutions need to make sure that they choose a compatible solution with their existing systems and software. For example, if your applications speak the S3 API language, your storage systems must also speak the same language.

Many organizations use software-based backup tools to get things done. To take advantage of the benefits of cloud storage, these digital tools should also integrate with your storage solution. Popular backup solutions such as MSP360 and Veeam are built with native integrations for ease of use.

Support Models

The level of support you want and need should factor into your decision-making when choosing a cloud provider. If you know your team needs fast access to support personnel, make sure the cloud provider you choose offers a support SLA or the opportunity to purchase elevated levels of support.

Questions to Ask Before Deciding on a Cloud Storage Solution

Of course, there are other considerations to take into account. For example, managed service providers will likely need a cloud storage solution to manage multiple servers. Small business owners may only need a set amount of storage for now but with the ability to easily scale with pay-as-you-go pricing as the business grows. IT professionals might be looking for a simplified interface and centralized management to make monitoring and reporting more efficient.

When comparing different cloud solutions for object storage, there are a few more questions to ask before making a purchase:

  • Is there a web-based admin console? A web-based admin console makes it easy to view backups from multiple servers. You can manage all your storage from one single location and download or recover files from anywhere in the world with a network connection.
  • Are there multiple ways to interact with the storage? Does the provider offer different ways to access your data, for example, via a web console, APIs, CLI, etc.? If your infrastructure is configured to work with the S3 API, does the provider offer S3 compatibility?
  • Can you set retention? Some industries are more highly regulated than others. Consider whether your company needs a certain retention policy and ensure that your cloud storage provider doesn’t unnecessarily charge minimum file retention fees.
  • Is there native application support? A native environment can be helpful to back up an Exchange and SQL Server appropriately, especially for team members who are less experienced in cloud storage.
  • What types of restores does it offer? Another crucial factor to consider is how you can recover your data from cloud storage, if necessary.

Making a Buying Decision: The Intangibles

Lastly, don’t just consider the individual software and cloud storage solutions you’re buying. You should also consider the company you’re buying from. It’s worth doing your due diligence when vetting a cloud storage provider. Here are some areas to consider:

Stability

When it comes to crucial business data, you need to choose a company with a long-standing reputation for stability.

Data loss can happen if a not-so-well-known cloud provider suddenly goes down for good. And some lesser-known providers may not offer the same quality of uptime, storage, and other security and customer support options.

Find out how long the company has been providing cloud storage services, and do a little research to find out how popular its cloud services are.

Customers

Next, take a look at the organizations that use their cloud storage backup solutions. Do they work with companies similar to yours? Are there industry-specific features that can boost your business?

Choosing a cloud storage company that can provide the specs that your business requires plays an important role in the overall success of your organization. By looking at the other customers that a cloud storage company works with, you can better understand whether or not the solution will meet your needs.

Reviews

Online reviews are a great way to see how users respond to a cloud storage product’s features and benefits before trying it out yourself.

Many software review websites such as G2, Gartner Peer Insights, and Capterra offer a comprehensive overview of different cloud storage products and reviews from real customers. You can also take a look at the company’s website for case studies with companies like yours.

Values

Another area to investigate when choosing a cloud storage provider is the company values.

Organizations typically work with other companies that mirror their values and enhance their ability to put them into action. Choosing a cloud storage provider with the correct values can help you reach new clients. But choosing a provider with values that don’t align with your organization can turn customers away.

Many tech companies are proud of their values, so it’s easy to get a feel for what they stand for by checking out their social media feeds, about pages, and reviews from people who work there.

Continuous Improvement

An organization’s ability to improve over time shows resiliency, an eye for innovation, and the ability to deliver high-quality products to users like you. You can find out if a cloud storage provider has a good track record for improving and innovating their products by performing a search query for new products and features, new offerings, additional options, and industry recognition.

Keep each of the above factors in mind when choosing a server backup solution for your needs.

How Cloud Storage Can Protect Servers and Critical Business Data

Businesses have already made huge progress in moving to the cloud to enable digital transformations. Cloud-based solutions can help businesses modernize server backup solutions or adopt hybrid cloud strategies. To summarize, here are a few things to remember when considering a cloud storage solution for your server backup needs:

  • Understand the pros and cons of on-premises backup solutions and consider a hybrid cloud approach to storing backups.
  • Evaluate a provider’s cost, security offerings, integrations, and support structure.
  • Consider intangible factors like reputation, reviews, and values.

Have more questions about cloud storage or how to implement cloud backups for your server? Let us know in the comments. Ready to get started? Your first 10GB are free.

The post Server Backup 101: Choosing a Server Backup Solution appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Better Backup Practices: What Is the Grandfather-Father-Son Approach?

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/better-backup-practices-what-is-the-grandfather-father-son-approach/

What Is the Grandfather-Father-Son Backup Strategy

They say the older you get, the more you become your parents. It’s so true, Progressive Insurance built an entire marketing campaign around it. (Forcing food on your family? Guilty.) But when it comes to backups, generational copies are a good thing. In fact, there’s a widely-used backup approach based on the idea—grandfather-father-son (GFS) backups.

In this post, we’ll explain what GFS is and how GFS works, we’ll share an example GFS backup plan, and we’ll show you how you can use GFS to organize your backup approach.

What Are Grandfather-Father-Son Backups?

Whether you’re setting up your first cloud backup or researching how to enhance your data security practices, chances are you’ve already got the basics figured out, like using at least a 3-2-1 backup strategy, if not a 3-2-1-1-0 or a 4-3-2. You’ve realized you need at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different media, and one copy stored off-site. The next part of your strategy is to consider how often to perform full backups, with the assumption that you’ll fill the gap between full backups with incremental (or differential) backups.

One way to simplify your decision-making around backup strategy, including when to perform full vs. incremental backups, is to follow the GFS backup scheme. GFS provides recommended, but flexible, rotation cycles for full and incremental backups and has the added benefit of providing layers of data protection in a manageable framework.

Refresher: Full vs. Incremental vs. Differential vs. Synthetic Backups

There are four different types of backups: full, incremental, synthetic full, and differential. And choosing the right mix of types helps you maximize efficiency versus simply performing full backups all the time and monopolizing bandwidth and storage space. Here’s a quick refresher on each type:

  • Full backups: A complete copy of your data.
  • Incremental backups: A copy of data that has changed or has been added since your last full backup or since the last incremental backup.
  • Synthetic full backups: A synthesized “full” backup copy created from the full backup you have stored in the cloud plus your subsequent incremental backups. Synthetic full backups are much faster than full backups.
  • Differential backups: A specialized type of backups popular for database applications like Microsoft SQL but not used frequently otherwise. Differential backups copy all changes since the last full backup every time (versus incrementals which only contain changes or additions since the last incremental). As you make changes to your data set, your differential backup grows.

Check out our complete guide on the difference between full, incremental, synthetic full, and differential backups here.

How Do GFS Backups Work?

In the traditional GFS approach, a full backup is completed on the same day of each month (for example, the last day of each month or the fourth Friday of each month—however you want to define it). This is the “grandfather” cycle. It’s best practice to store this backup off-site or in the cloud. This also helps satisfy the off-site requirement of a 3-2-1 strategy.

Next, another full backup is set to run on a more frequent basis, like weekly. Again, you can define when exactly this full backup should take place, keeping in mind your business’s bandwidth requirements. (Because full backups will most definitely tie up your network for a while!) This is the “father” cycle, and, ideally, your backup should be stored locally and/or in hot cloud storage, like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, where it can be quickly and easily accessed if needed.

Last, plan to cover your bases with daily incremental backups. These are the “son” backups, and they should be stored in the same location as your “father” backups.

GFS Backups: An Example

In the example month shown below, the grandfather backup is completed on the last day of each month. Father full backups run every Sunday, and incremental son backups run Monday through Saturday.

What Is the Grandfather-Father-Son Backup Strategy Diagram

It’s important to note that the daily-weekly-monthly cadence is a common approach, but you could perform your incremental son backups even more often than daily (Like hourly!) or you could set your grandfather backups to run yearly instead of monthly. Some choose to run grandfather backups monthly and “great-grandfather” backups yearly. Essentially, you just want to create three regular backup cycles (one full backup to off-site storage; one full backup to local or hot storage; and incremental backups to fill the gaps) with your grandfather full backup cycle being performed less often than your father full backup cycle.

How Long Should You Retain GFS Backups?

Last, it’s important to also consider your retention policy for each backup cycle. In other words, how long do you want to keep your monthly grandfather backups, in case you need to restore data from one? How long do you want to keep your father and son backups? Are you in an industry that has strict data retention requirements?

You’ll want to think about how to balance regulatory requirements with storage costs. By the way, you might find us a little biased towards Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage because, at $5/TB/month, you can afford to keep your backups in quickly accessible hot storage and keep them archived for as long as you need without worrying about an excessive cloud storage bill.

Ultimately, you’ll find that grandfather-father-son is an organized approach to creating and retaining full and incremental backups. It takes some planning to set up but is fairly straightforward to follow once you have a system in place. You have multiple fallback options in case your business is impacted by ransomware or a natural disaster, and you still have the flexibility to set backup cycles that meet your business needs and storage requirements.

Ready to Get Started With GFS Backups and Backblaze B2?

Check out our Business Backup solutions and safeguard your GFS backups in the industry’s leading independent storage cloud.

The post Better Backup Practices: What Is the Grandfather-Father-Son Approach? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

What’s the Diff: File-level vs. Block-level Incremental Backups

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-the-diff-file-level-vs-block-level-incremental-backups/

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog, chances are you already know that you need to be backing up your data to protect your home or business. Maybe you’re a hobbyist with over 1,000 digital movies in your collection and you lie awake at night, worrying about what would happen if your toddler spills juice on your NAS (let’s face it, toddlers are data disasters waiting to happen). Or you’re a media and entertainment professional worried about keeping archives of your past projects on an on-premises device. Or maybe that tornado that hit your area last week caused you to think twice about keeping all of your data on-premises.

Whether you have a background in IT or not, the many different configuration options for your backup software and cloud storage can be confusing. Today, we’re hoping to clear up one common question when it comes to backup strategies—understanding the difference between file-level and block-level incremental backups.

Refresher: Full vs. Incremental Backups

First things first, let’s define what we’re dealing with: the difference between full and incremental backups. The first step in any backup plan is to perform a full backup of your data. Plan to do this on a slow day because it can take a long time and hog a lot of bandwidth. Of course, if you’re a Backblaze customer, you can also use the Backblaze Fireball to get your data into Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage without taking up precious internet resources.

You should plan on regularly performing full backups because it’s always a good idea to have a fresh, full copy of your entire data set. Some people perform full backups weekly, some might do them monthly or even less often; it’s up to you as you plan your backup strategy.

Then, typically, incremental backups are performed in between your full backups. Want to know more about the difference between full and incremental backups and the considerations for each? Check out our recent blog post on the different types of backups.

What’s the Diff: File-level vs. Block-level Incremental Backups

Let’s take it to the next level. Incremental backups back up what has been changed or added since your last full backup. Within the category of incremental backups, there are two standard options: file-level and block-level incremental backups. Many backup tools and devices, like network attached storage (NAS) devices, offer these options in the configuration settings, so it’s important to understand the difference. After you decide which type of incremental backup is best for you, check your backup software or device’s support articles to see if you can configure this setting for yourself.

File-level Incremental Backups

When a file-level incremental backup is performed and a file has been modified, the entire file is copied to your backup repository. This takes longer than performing a block-level backup because your backup software will scan all your files to see which ones have changed since the last full backup and will then back up the entire modified file again.

Imagine that you have a really big file and you make one small change to that file; with file-level backups, the whole file is re-uploaded. This likely sounds pretty inefficient, but there are some advantages to a file-level backup:

  • It’s simple and straightforward.
  • It allows you to pick and choose the files you want backed up.
  • You can include or exclude certain file types or easily back up specific directories.

File-level backups might be the right choice for you if you’re a home techie who wants to back up their movie collection, knowing that those files are not likely to change. Or it could be a good fit for a small business with a small amount of data that isn’t frequently modified.

The diagram below illustrates this concept. This person performs their full backup on Sundays and Wednesdays. (To be clear, we’re not recommending this cadence—it’s just for demonstration purposes.) This results in a 100% copy of their data to a backup repository like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. On Monday, part of a file is changed (the black triangle) and a new file is added (the red square). The file-level incremental backup uploads the new file (the red square) and the entire file that has changed (the grey square with the black triangle). On Tuesday, another file is changed (the purple triangle). When the file-level incremental backup is performed, it adds the entire file (the grey square with the purple triangle) to the backup repository. On Wednesday, a new full backup is run, which creates a complete copy of the source data (including all your previously changed and added data) and stores that in the cloud. This starts the cycle of full backups to incremental backups over again.

Click to expand.

Block-level Incremental Backups

Block-level incremental backups do not copy the entire file if only a portion of it has changed. With this option, only the changed part of the file is sent to the backup repository. Because of this, block-level backups are faster and require less storage space. If you’re backing up to cloud storage, obviously this will help you save on storage costs.

Let’s return to our scenario where full backups are performed on Sundays and Wednesdays, but this time, block-level incrementals are being run in between. When the first block-level incremental backup is run on Monday, the backup software copies just the changed piece of data in the file (the black triangle) and the new data (the red square). In the Tuesday backup, the additional modified data in another file (the purple triangle) is also added to the backup repository. On Wednesday, the new full backup results in a fresh copy of the full data set to the cloud.

Click to expand.

Block-level incremental backups take a snapshot of the running volume and data is read from the snapshot. This allows files to be copied even if they’re currently in use in a running software program, and it also reduces the impact on your machine’s performance while the backup is running.

This backup type works better than file-level incremental backups when you have a large number of files or files that often change. If you don’t need to pick and choose which files to specifically include or exclude in your backup, it’s generally best to use block-level incremental backups, as they’re more efficient.

The only drawbacks to block-level incremental backups are that recovery may take longer, since your backup software will need to recover each piece of modified data and rebuild the file. And, because this style of incremental backup uploads modified data in pieces and parts, if one of those pieces becomes corrupted or is unable to be recovered, it could affect your ability to recover the whole file. For this reason (and plenty of other good reasons), it’s important to regularly include full backups in your backup strategy and not just count on incremental backups perpetually.

Ready to Get Started?

No matter which method of incremental backup you decide is right for you, you can take advantage of Backblaze’s extremely affordable B2 Cloud Storage at just $5/TB/month. Back up your servers or your NAS in a matter of minutes and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re protected from a data disaster.

The post What’s the Diff: File-level vs. Block-level Incremental Backups appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

What’s the Diff: Full, Incremental, Differential, and Synthetic Full Backups

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-the-diff-full-incremental-differential-and-synthetic-full-backups/

What's the Diff: Full, Incremental, Differential, Synthetic

If you made your way here to the Backblaze blog, you probably understand the value of backing up your data. Data disasters, like ransomware attacks, floods, and fires, can easily cost a business thousands of dollars in recovery expenses. But whether you’re an IT professional or a small or medium-sized business owner, what you may not realize is that knowing you need to back up is just the first step.

Next, you have to think about what kind of backup strategy you should have in place. Specifically, there are four different types of backups that you need to consider:

  • Full backups.
  • Incremental backups.
  • Synthetic full backups.
  • Differential backups.

Some of our integration tools, like MSP360 and Veeam, let you configure the type of backup you want to perform, so it’s important to understand the difference. Choosing the right backup type also means maximizing efficiency, as simply performing a full backup of your data on a daily basis would take up too much bandwidth and storage, resulting in unnecessary extra costs.

Not sure what kind of backup you need to do? In this post, learn the differences and when each should be used.

First Things First: Full Backups

A full backup is the very first backup you create of your data. You start with nothing—no backup—and then you make a complete copy of your data. It will probably take a while, because you’re starting from nothing, making this your longest backup job.

Full Backup Pros and Cons

You can see how it would be time-consuming to do a full backup each time, right? Who has time for that? In the time you’re taking to do a full backup each day, you could be balancing your bank account, reorganizing your closet, or let’s be honest here, playing Wordle (guilty). Plus, you would likely need a lot of extra bandwidth and storage to be able to run a full backup everyday.

However, full backups are also the best option for recovery, because they contain all the files you need. Because your full backup is a clone of your data, it’s super important to encrypt them. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage stores the data you put in it. You can choose to upload only encrypted data or use a third-party integration to encrypt data before transmission to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. We also support server-side encryption (SSE) using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), with multiple key management options. Don’t forget this essential step!

You should think about how often to do your full backups, given that they are the safest recovery option but also the most time-consuming and expensive to complete. Some people do full backups daily; some do them weekly; and some complete them monthly, or even less often. It all depends on your backup strategy plan and how you balance your needs for data security vs. your resources, like time, funds, etc. For example, in the image below, this person has decided to do their full backup on a Sunday. Their source data is copied exactly as-is into the cloud. This provides them the security of a 100% true copy of their data.

Click to expand.

TLDR Version:

  • ✅ 100% true copy of data.
  • ✅ Best for file restoration in terms of data fidelity.
  • ❌ Expensive.
  • ❌ Slow.

Now, Just the Changes: Incremental Backups

Once you have your full backup, you have a baseline for any subsequent backups. For reasons already explained, it’s probably not efficient for you to do a full backup each time. That’s where incremental backups come in.

Incremental backups copy the data that has changed or has been added since your last full backup and then, any newly changed or added data since the previous incremental backup. Now, there are two different types of incremental backups: file-level and block-level, but let’s keep things simple here and save that topic for a future blog post, shall we?

Let’s take a look at the image below. This person performs their full backups on Sundays and Wednesdays so that they always have a fairly recent complete copy of their data. Then, on the other days of the week, they perform incremental backups. (To be clear, we’re not recommending this cadence—it’s just for demonstration purposes.) Here’s a step-by-step overview of the process:

  • Sunday: A full backup is created.
  • Monday: After the full backup on Sunday, one file is changed (the purple triangle) and one new file is added (the red square). Both of these changes are uploaded to the backup repository in the cloud.
  • Tuesday: An additional new file is created (the second red square). This one piece of new data is sent to the cloud. You can see how incremental backups are backing up only new or changed data one piece at a time.
  • Wednesday: A new full backup is run, which creates a complete copy of the source data (including all your previously changed and added data) and stores that in the cloud. This starts the cycle of full backups to incremental backups over again.
Click to expand.

Note that there is another consideration here—whether you want your full backups to overwrite your existing backup repository or whether you would like to keep the previous versions of your files for extra security. Keeping an archive of your previous versions takes up more space (and therefore costs more) but it can be helpful to have an archive for some length of time (called your “retention period”). On the other hand, some backup providers charge retention minimums where they continue to bill you for data deleted before a certain time frame—make sure to read the terms and conditions carefully so you’re not stuck paying for deleted backups. Again, this all differs according to your data security needs. Some people keep archives going back a month. Some may keep an archive for a full year’s worth of previous versions. It’s all up to you.

Incremental Backup Pros and Cons

In a disaster recovery scenario, your restore will consist of your full backup and all of the incremental backups you’ve made. If you’ve made a lot of changes to your data since your last full backup, your restore could take some time, as it progresses through this “chain” of incremental changes. In other words, if you are only doing full backups monthly or less often and you add or change a lot of data in between, your recovery will take a long time because the restore will first process your last full backup and then each piece of incrementally changed or added data.

Another downside is that your recovery could be compromised by any missing or damaged files, which would break your “chain” of backups and would make recovery of those files impossible. For this reason (and because having a fairly recent full backup is always a good idea), it’s important to do full backups regularly so you have a “fresh” full copy of your data to work from.

Determining how often and when to do your full backups, as well as deciding how many previous versions of your backups you want to keep, is a strategic decision that should take into consideration your typical operating conditions, your risk factors, your budget, and your time. For instance, you could perform a full backup on Sundays and incremental backups Monday-Saturday. Or, you may not even perform full backups as often as that; it’s important to think about your data and how often it changes.

TLDR Version:

  • ✅ Takes up little space.
  • ✅ Cost-saving.
  • ❌ Slower recoveries.
  • ❌ Corrupted files compromise the backup.

A Better Way: Synthetic Full Backups

We’ve already talked about the need to perform regular full backups, even if (and especially if) you’re using incremental backups. We’ve also discussed how regular full backups can be time-consuming. Synthetic full backups may give you the best of all worlds. They make use of incremental backups to create a more efficient full backup experience.

In a synthetic full backup, your backup software takes your previous full backup and all the incremental backups you’ve created over a set period of time and combines them into a new full, synthesized backup. Your new synthetic backup contains the same data as an active full backup. The only difference is how the new backup is created. Instead of copying your source data to create a new, full backup, the synthetic full backup includes the unchanged data from the source plus all the incremental backups of changed data.

In the diagram below, our hypothetical Backblaze customer performed a full backup on Sunday and an incremental backup on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, their backup software performed a synthetic full backup by taking the previous backups from the backup repository and forging them into a new data set that is also a faithful copy of the source data. In other words, the synthetic full backup is completed in the cloud by merging the backups in the cloud, rather than referring to the source data.

Click to expand.

Synthetic Full Backup Pros and Cons

Synthetic full backups are much faster than normal, active full backups. And because they contain a 100% copy of your data, they serve as the starting point for any subsequent incremental backups, thus resetting your backup chain.

Your backup software may have an option in your settings that needs to be turned on to enable synthetic full backups, so be sure to check out your tool’s help resources to locate this option. You will also be able to define when that synthetic full backup should be created. Put some thought into this, considering when and how often your data gets changed. Because your synthetic full backup is based on the interim incremental backups, it’s still somewhat at risk of being corrupted if one of the incremental backups is damaged.

However, since synthetic backups are much faster to create, you can regularly create new synthetic full backups to reduce that risk. For instance, let’s say you create your first full backup on Sunday. Then, Monday-Saturday you create incremental backups of your changed data. On the next Sunday, your system creates a synthetic full backup by combining the unchanged data from the first full backup plus all of the incremental backups completed during the week.

Ultimately, synthetic full backups allow you to create full backups more often, without hogging up precious bandwidth or storage space. And, having a full backup of your data is always the best way to protect your business from a data disaster.

Some of Backblaze’s integration partners support synthetic full backups, including MSP360 and Veeam, so be sure to check your backup tool’s help articles to see if this option is available to you.

TLDR Version:

  • ✅ Less time-consuming.
  • ✅ Saves on storage costs.
  • ❌ Not as effective if lots of changes are made.
  • ❌ Still relies on incremental backups.

A Specialized Solution: Differential Backups

There’s another kind of backup to be aware of. Differential backups are popular for database applications like Microsoft SQL but not used frequently otherwise. Differential backups look at the last full backup only, and they collect the changes from the full backup. As you make changes to your original data set (the one in the full backup), your differential backup grows.

In our visual below, the full backup takes place on a Sunday. Each time the differential backup runs, it “looks back” to the full backup to see what has changed from the original source data. Again, changes can be modified files (like our purple triangle) or new files (like our red squares). It adds these changes to the backup repository in a cumulative way, which means differential backups can grow to be quite large.

Click to expand.

Differential Backup Pros and Cons

Like incremental backups, differential backups are much faster to perform than a full backup. To perform a recovery from a differential backup, you just need the full backup and the latest differential backup. So differential backup restores can be quite fast. But the overall differential backup can take up a large amount of storage space, as the changed files are uploaded to the backup repository until a new full backup is done. Hence, they don’t necessarily offer cost savings in the way of storage.

Lastly, differential backups are used so infrequently that they almost don’t merit mention here, but we wanted to include them to present a full picture of the different kinds of backups out there.

TLDR Version:

  • ✅ Good solution for database applications like SQL.
  • ✅ Faster recoveries.
  • ❌ Not cost-effective.
  • ❌ Requires regular full backups as a base.

As you can see, there is a lot to think about when developing your backup strategy. Backblaze is here to help and demystify the process. Learn more about our backup and archive solutions and get started with our free 10GB offer today.

The post What’s the Diff: Full, Incremental, Differential, and Synthetic Full Backups appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Build the Right Tech Stack for Your MSP

Post Syndicated from Kari Rivas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-build-the-right-tech-stack-for-your-msp/

As a managed service provider (MSP) or IT consultant, your bottom line depends on having the right tools at the right prices to maintain your margins while still providing the resources and functionality your clients need. And you’ve likely seen the resources and functionality your clients need changing over the past few years towards an increased focus on cybersecurity and disaster recovery.

More and more companies are hiring remotely, which means increased security risks, ransomware attacks on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have increased, and severe natural disasters are threatening on-premises office technology. Having the right tech stack for your MSP demonstrates to current and potential clients that they can trust you to safeguard their valuable data and systems against the threats of today and tomorrow.

Level up your value proposition with insights on building a competitive “right-sized” tech stack at our upcoming webinar, “The Essential MSP Tech Stack,” on Tuesday, February 15th at 1 p.m. CST/2 p.m. EST.

➔ Sign Up for the Webinar

Read on to get a preview of what will be covered during the webinar.

The Top Considerations for an Essential MSP Tech Stack

SMBs outsource their IT to MSPs and consultants because they don’t have the time, knowledge, or resources to shop around for the right tech solution for themselves. They may not even know what criteria they should be using to evaluate solutions, and this can lead to them shopping around among MSPs based on price alone.

Sourcing solutions with a lower cost to you means you can price your services more competitively and better attract customers. But pricing is just one of the considerations you should make when purchasing software. Have you also thought about scalability, and whether your tech stack can grow with you as your client base grows? Or what kinds of support options your software provider has available?

Pricing is important, yes, but there are several other factors by which you should judge your tech stack options, including features, automation options, and integrations, which will be covered in more detail during the webinar.

Right-sizing Your MSP Tech Stack

To develop your MSP offering, you’ll also want to think about what MSP services are most in demand in your area and what solutions you can offer the most efficiently and cost-effectively. It’s not “essential” to offer everything. The right tech stack is the one that brings you the most clients at the greatest profitability.

You may even want to do some research on the other MSPs in your geographic area. Is there something you can offer that they do not? Play to your strengths—what technical areas do you know the best?

As you start to develop your offering, consider the following areas of managed IT services and how they might help you attract clients:

Backup and Cloud Storage for MSPs

When it comes to managed backup and cloud storage, Backblaze and our partner, MSP360, have you covered. Backblaze provides easy and affordable server and workstation backup, and our integration with MSP360 provides a seamless experience to back up standalone and multiple servers to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

MSPs and IT organizations with multiple servers can manage all of their machines from one, centralized, web-based admin console. Backblaze B2 backups are “set it and forget it” after the initial setup. Data is kept in hot storage and available immediately when needed. And B2 Cloud Storage is extremely affordable at $5/TB per month without any additional fees or tiered pricing structure.

Our integration with MSP360 includes advanced backup protection features like flexible scheduling, compression, encryption, and ransomware protection. We’ve even made it super easy to get started on your own. Just use our online onboarding tool to create both Backblaze B2 and MSP360 accounts at the same time.

Bundling MSP Services to Streamline the Purchase Decision

Consider bundling your services to make it easier for clients to buy from you and understand how you’ll help protect their business. For instance, the joint solution from MSP360 and Backblaze can be bundled as part of a disaster recovery, backup, and storage package. You could also create tiers of services, like a “bronze” level disaster recovery, backup, and storage package; a “silver” level package that includes all of the above plus monitoring, tech management, and installation services; and a “gold” level package that functions essentially like fully outsourced IT.

Non-IT Tools for the MSP Tech Stack

Finally, as you build your MSP, don’t forget that your tech stack may need to include non-IT tools as well. You’ll need a way to oversee business accounting and your books, a way to manage your client relationships, leads, and sales, plus software to manage employees, payroll, and other aspects of general business management.

Ready to Upgrade Your Tech Stack?

Having the right tech stack isn’t a matter of checking all the boxes on a list of software. It’s a strategic decision about what your potential clients will most value, what you’re best equipped to offer, and how you can make a profit. Instead of trying to meet every possible need, ensure that you have the “right-sized” tech stack to service the types of clients you represent without paying extra for bloated software that may go unused. You can often have a healthier business by specializing in just a few areas and attracting the right types of clients, rather than trying to cater to everyone.

Want to learn more? Join our webinar on Tuesday, February 15th at 1 p.m. CST/2 p.m. EST to learn more about how to build the tech stack for your MSP.

The post How to Build the Right Tech Stack for Your MSP appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.