Of Course It's Backed Up, It's In the Cloud, Right? Wrong!

A strong misconception that is out there right now is that if your data is being hosted in the cloud, the company that is hosting this data is backing it up. This is something that you as a client MUST confirm, because the majority of the time this is absolutely not true. This is across the board with all companies that host your data.

Do yourself a favor: get in touch with your cloud provider hosting your data and ask them for their backup strategy of your data as well as their data and servers. Many of them will tell you that they have redundancy in place. With that answer many people accept it to mean backup, but you need to ask clarifying questions. Do they have redundancy in the same location? If this is the case, what good is that if the place blows up?

If it is to an offsite location: Is it an instant failover to the redundant location? Is is automatic? Is it manual? How often is the data being sent? Does this meet your company Recovery Time Objective (RTO*)? What about your Recovery Point Objective (RPO**)

If they are doing backup, how long do they hold your backup for? Is it 1 day? 7 days? 30 days? 365 days? If you have an accidental deletion, can they restore your files?

Most cloud providers ONLY provide infrastructure as part of their service, NOT backup. Many offer backup as an add-on, but not automatically and how frequent and how long data is backed up are things that you need to setup.

If you are thinking about the cloud or using the cloud now and you are not sure of the backup answers, don't wait until you need the backup to find that it's not there. You don't want to be told it was clearly explained in the fine print.

This is a common situation we find when we speak with new clients and review their current setup. Most of the time, they are under the assumption that they are in the cloud and they have no more worries about backup, compliance, disaster recovery and connectivity. This is very far from being true. It is up to you to ensure that you fully understand what is happening to your data. Ask to see their backup plans and disaster recovery plans. Your discoveries may be surprising. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

*RTO - Recovery Time Objective is the time it takes your company to get the servers and business back up and running after a failure. The shorter the time, the higher the expense. The longer you can afford to be down, the lower the cost of solutions.

**RPO - Recovery Point Objective is the time between the last backup and the time of failure. For example, you do a nightly backup at 11pm, the next day you work all day, the servers crashed at 3pm. The last backup you had was 11pm. What happens to all the work that was done from the time you opened in the morning until 3pm. Is that recoverable? How would you get all that data back into the system when the servers were back up and running?

There are solutions that take backups every few minutes that are very cost effective. Do you have the right solution which meets these objectives?

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the above items.