During Cloud Field Day in the Bay area we met with the Rubrik Team, Chris Wahl, Rebecca Fitzhugh and Andrew Miller.  I was excited to learn more about what they are doing with their product and the ability to do backups in the cloud.  More specifically their solutions work great with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure.  Definitely two of the major cloud players today for virtualized servers.

So you may be asking why do I need to back up my cloud? 

Well historically cloud providers do not backup your cloud data for any form of customer related recovery.  Now there could be some other methods of redundancy to keep your data intact in the event of a disaster, but this just technically doesn’t cover all scenarios you could be faced with.  Yes, this can vary, but unless your contract with Amazon, Microsoft or any other cloud provider says they will restore your data it’s not going to happen.

Protect Your Data

At Cloud Field Day we heard from Rubrik on the topic of cloud backups.  We learned that they have several product options that will ensure your data is protected even if the data is in the cloud.  Of these I will plan to discuss with you what the Rubrik Cloud Cluster option can provide you during the rest of this post.

Backup and Recovery of Cloud Apps

“Deploy Rubrik as a SW instance to protect cloud-native apps (Windows, Linux, SQL) by writing to the cloud providers storage service)”, Rubrik

For me the value here is to be able to ensure that if the worst happens then regardless of where my data exists I should be able to recover it.  Over the years, I have seen many different forms of server and service related catastrophes.  One of the worst was one where I was brought into help was a major server recovery.  The environment was thought to backed up, but in the end wasn’t.  Then there was a major hardware failure to took at portions of the business.  Rebuilding in these cases was done in phases.  Get critical systems online ASAP, and non-critical systems took weeks.  I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.  When planning for the cloud your approach to ensuring that data is backed up and recovered should be a priority.

Cloud Data Archival

“Archive cloud-native data to a cloud blob storage service.  Instantly access archived data with real-time search”, Rubrik

Data archival is one of those topics that I find enterprises struggle with.  When the money is put into doing archival, and it’s done right it works really well.  So why is this a struggle?  Often times it is the cost, but most of the time it’s about deciding how long to keep the data.  Sounds simple right, but without someone willing to make that decision I have seen these projects take years to just get the business approval to move forward.

Office Site DR:  Replication

“Replicate cloud-native data back to appliance.  Replicate data from appliance to cloud”, Rubrik

I really can appreciate the concept of using this product as an offsite disaster recover (DR) option.  Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity shouldn’t be hard, but many organizations make the attempt to implement this very type of technology and don’t succeed.  Often times just due to the people power required to undertake and deploy a remote site for failover.  So, what if the infrastructure already existed for you in the cloud?  Now I bet I have your attention.

Cloud-to-Cloud Replication

“Replicate to different regions.  Replication between heterogenous cloud providers”, Rubrik

So, what if you have some or all of your workloads in the cloud, and you are looking for business continuity of those systems that exist only in that cloud platform?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to replicate that data to another cloud provider as a form of redundancy and potential failover?  While this likely isn’t a common use case today, I would expect that as more and more companies move away from maintaining infrastructure this will be a conversation that they are having.

Always Innovating

At Cloud Field Day we learned about a lot of really great things that Rubrik is offering as part of its platform. If your organization is having discussions about moving to cloud, or is already there then you should also be taking the time ensure you have a solid backup and recovery strategy for the long run.