Protecting your cloud data seems easy – just upload it to a hyperscale service provider like AWS or Azure and they do the rest, right?
Not so fast.
Our recent report, Cloud Protection Trends for 2023, highlights some critical data around who is moving to the cloud, who is moving out of the cloud and how they’re backing up and protecting their data.
The key takeaway? Companies are increasingly moving to the cloud, but it’s a two-way street, with some shifting back to on-prem.
But most importantly, companies moving in either direction are increasingly thinking about Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as tools to protect critical business information.
“Between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of physical servers in the data centre is predicted to fall from 38 per cent to 24 per cent,” says Alan Warmington, Director, Cloud and Service Provider Sales ANZ. “At the same time, virtual machines on hosts within the data centre will fall from 30 per cent to 24 per cent.
“But most critically,” Warmington continued, “the number of hosted virtual machines within a ‘hyperscale’ or service provider is predicted to rise from 32 per cent to 52 per cent in the same period.”
Moving back to the data centre – why backup is critical
One of the most interesting statistics to come out of the report is that only one in eight of the organisations surveyed have not repatriated cloud-hosted workloads back to a data centre.
Around 88 per cent brought workloads back for one of several reasons, including disaster recovery failback, staging versus production, or the realisation cloud was not the best solution for the workload in question.
While companies are bringing back workloads in the data centre, for organisations with a cloud-first strategy, new workloads able to run in the cloud will start there. But significantly, less than one third of cloud servers were initially launched in a cloud host, while the remaining two thirds were migrated from the data centre.
“This means a data protection strategy needs to not only back up cloud-hosted workloads after they are brought online in a cloud,” says Warmington, “but they also must be able to assist in the migration from cloud to data centre, or cloud to alternative cloud based on business requirements.”
File sharing and databases in the cloud
The vast majority of respondents in the study are hosting both files and databases in the cloud. Sixty-six per cent run file shares on server instances hosted on Amazon EC2, while a slightly smaller number (60 per cent) do the same on Azure. For databases, the figures are switched around, with 61 per cent on Amazon and 65 per cent on Azure.
What’s most concerning, says Warmington, is the resiliency of cloud services can sometimes incorrectly lead organisations to not back up their cloud-hosted workloads.
“They’re wrong about this,” says Warmington, “if you read the terms of service provided by AWS, Azure or another MSP, the onus is always on the customer to have a backup solution in place. It’s the customer’s responsibility, not the service provider.”
In fact, 34 per cent of respondents believe their cloud-hosted file shares are durable or do not need to be backed up, while 15 per cent felt the same way about their databases.
This is where Veeam can help. We deliver AWS, Azure and Google cloud-native backup and recovery options for databases and file shares, regardless of whether they are hosted on IaaS or PaaS. The protection we offer is not a one-size-fits-all solution, instead being native to, and purpose built for each workload or data set.
Solutions for Microsoft365
With the prevalence of Microsoft365 in departments and agencies, the good news is most admins understand backup and recovery is their responsibility. Seventy-eight per cent use a third-party backup product or a BaaS service with their Microsoft365 infrastructure.
However, says Warmington, there are still misunderstandings between application owners and backup admins about data protection. “While application owners may be mainly concerned with uptime and relatively recent rollback, backup admins tend to focus on compliance mandates, cyber and other disasters,” Warmington says.
Despite this, both groups recognised a backup tool or BaaS provided better capabilities than built in functions, which admins of less mature platforms than Microsoft365 often did not.
What’s clear is backup is critical for cloud and on-prem infrastructure.
Regardless of which way you’re moving data, it needs protection and it’s up to the customer to obtain that protection – the service providers won’t do it for you.
For more insights on data protection, download the Cloud Protection Trends for 2023 report.
