Many companies who finally decide to move their data and workloads to the cloud based backup solutions, neglect the idea of further using their on-premises structure. It has been noted that companies who move to the cloud also prefer backing up their data to cloud as well but is it a wise idea to back up your infrastructure that is running on the public cloud? Well, this is a business question to say the least, not a technical question. It purely depends on your company and your data, you need to decide this yourself.
Preferably it is not ideal to back up your data in a single site or cloud. How can you sleep at night knowing that your data can be compromised? So it’s best to have a backup for your backup.
On-Premises Backup
Luckily, there is another way. On-Premises back up. Not only will this give you a peace of mind but it can also save you some money by using your on-premises infrastructure for backup which you might have thrown away after moving to the cloud. It would be like an ‘added layer of security’.
Benefits
If we talk about the advantages of having an on-premises backup, it is safe to say that they are many. Apart from an added layer of protection, there might be some legislative requirements for your company to retain a copy of your data on-premises.
If you are a large business and have been around for quite some time now, then you must have invested a significant amount of money into your on-premises data storage hardware and software so it’s best to utilize it instead of putting it all to waste.
Other than this it’s important for businesses to understand that at an event of a cyber-attack or disaster recovery, they can recover their data a lot faster as compared to an internet connection reliable backup.
Now having discussed this, let’s talk about the approaches companies can use to back up their data onto their, on premise infrastructure.
- Keep all your data on-premises
Store all your backups in your company’s on-premises data center and the only part of your backup that is in the cloud is the agents you have running on your VM workloads in your vendor’s cloud. Although this approach gives you great control, you need to keep the cost of bandwidth in mind as well. This approach can only be beneficial if the amount of data your company stores in the cloud is relatively small.
- Run backups in the datacenter and the store them in the cloud
Your backup appliances are located on-premises in this approach but, backups are directly written into the cloud storage. This is usually implemented by companies that need to back up huge volumes of data stored in the public cloud. The main advantage is more control over your backups but you need to trust your vendors for the security of your data.
- Run backups in the data center and store them in both the cloud & on-premises
This is the combination of the two ways. This means to use your data center to back up your cloud data and store it in the cloud, then the same on-premises backup appliance takes that backed up data in the cloud and replicates it to a local storage pool located on-premises. This ensure de duplication and added security.
- Run backups in the cloud and store them on-premises
Instead of using the on-premises backup appliance for on-premises backups, you provision your backup servers into the cloud where all your data and workloads reside. Then, you store the cloud based backups in your locally data center. This offers more control and ownership to your backed up data.
Conclusion
On-premises backup solution can be a good option for organizations who want to make use of their already built on-premises infrastructure. After moving to the cloud backup and disaster recovery, it is best to make use of your data center instead of just disposing it off. But, it mostly depends on your company and the data. If it makes business sense only then go for these approaches. Don’t just go for these for the sake of it, otherwise it will be more damaging than beneficial.
