Private, public and hybrid clouds are growing in popularity as lift and shift cloud apps are making migration easier for businesses.
Christian Mahncke, Enterprise Business Development at Routed, a vendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider, said that while cloud computing has proven that it is a better option than in-house servers, security challenges remain a concern and businesses require a solid cyber-security strategy.
“It is evident that companies are still experiencing common security challenges such as backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) failures, ISPs being hacked or Ransomware attacks. All of which are exposing the network and potentially sharing valuable personal information,” said Mahncke.
“These businesses are neglecting this important aspect within their cloud strategies, failing to include backups and DR in the overall planning.”He said that including security and a backup plan comes naturally for anyone that has migrated or developed new applications in the cloud:
“It is simpler to secure data by creating a DR environment in the cloud than doing so on-premise. Once all your applications are in the cloud, it takes care of all backup and DR requirements quickly and more cost effectively. Cloud provides one virtual environment, as opposed to a number of disparate applications each requiring individual backup and DR needs.”
The importance of looking after data, inside and outside of an organisation remains lacking, which means that DR is probably equally absent.
Mahncke said that there is a need for security policies and associated regular backups. This will automatically result in ensuing that proper DR is in place, and it works.
“So often backups only get tested after a server crash or security breach, only to discover that the backups do not exist or were never taken. DR is often absent as there is a belief that a multitude of backups constitutes DR,” explained Mahncke.
He stressed that backups are not DR, nor can multiple backups amount to any kind of DR. Backups are useful for immediate access to restore a document, but do not facilitate the failover of a total environment if the infrastructure becomes compromised.
“Backup is simply a copy of data intended to be restored to the original source, while disaster recovery requires a separate production environment where the data can live. All aspects of the current environment should be considered, including physical resources, software, connectivity and security,” said Mahncke.
