With 60% of the world’s corporate data stored in the cloud, organizations increasingly rely on cloud-based services to manage, store and access their data. All that data in the cloud is a massive cybersecurity risk if you consider that up to 48% is sensitive data. Additionally, threat actors are actively exploiting public cloud services such as AWS and Azure to spread RATs (remote access trojans) to steal sensitive data and compromise systems.
The problem is that many customers believe that the public cloud is inherently safe. They wrongly assume that storing their data in the cloud automatically means they’re immune to disasters and will have immediate access to their data should their cloud service provider experience an outage.
This emphasizes the importance of having an extra layer of data redundancy to spread the risk of an outage across multiple cloud services. Relying on a single cloud service equals a single point of failure. Redundancy means your data stored in the cloud is duplicated or backed up, enabling you to immediately retrieve or access that information should your public cloud service be compromised.
In this article, we’ll compare 4 cloud backup software solutions using the following criteria: cloud resilience, cloud backup and disaster recovery, and security features.
Stage2Data Cloud Provider Resiliency (CPR™)
CPRTM provides resilience, redundancy and recoverability between multiple cloud platforms, meaning you can recover from any cloud to any cloud, e.g., Azure, AWZ, and Google Cloud. All your data is securely duplicated, replicated or backed up, enabling you to immediately retrieve or access it should your cloud service be compromised or experience an outage. For example, CPRTM securely replicates and stores your cloud data and virtual machines in the Stage2Data private cloud, ready to recover to the public cloud or the environment where it was initially hosted.
You can also spin that environment up as a DR site until your original cloud environment(s) are restored. This means that if your primary cloud provider experience downtime, your cloud environment (data, servers and infrastructure) can be recovered in the Stage2Data cloud and restored to the initial or alternative cloud provider.
Alternative Cloud Recovery Solutions with Some Limitations
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud combines backup, anti-malware, and endpoint protection on one platform. It protects physical, virtual, and cloud environments while automating and streamlining backup and recovery processes. Acronis uses hybrid cloud architecture for backup and recovery, meaning users can choose between local or cloud-based storage for recovery.
Compared to CPR,TM the limitation of this solution is when your primary cloud provider is down, there is no alternative recovery option to which you can recover your data and you could experience significant data loss and downtime. This solution also has a number of quotas in place, including storage quotas, device quotas, and backup quotas. These quotas can limit the amount of data that can be backed up, the number of devices that can be protected, and the frequency of backups.
Appranix Cloud Application Resilience
Appranix Cloud Application Resilience offers application-centric data protection and recovery designed to protect mission-critical applications running in the cloud. Appranix’s automation features can help you recover your applications and data quickly from cloud provider to the same cloud provider (i.e., from AWS to AWS or Google Cloud to Google Cloud) in case of disasters or disruptions.
Appranix Cloud Application Resilience currently supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. However, if you are using a different cloud provider, you may not be able to use Appranix Cloud Application Resilience. Moreover, in the event of downtime, it appears like there is no seamless way to recover or migrate your data to an alternative cloud provider.
Druva Data Resiliency Cloud
Built on AWS, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud provides backup, disaster recovery, and governance capabilities for cloud workloads. This solution protects data in SaaS applications such as Office365, GSuite, and Salesforce, as well as virtual environments and databases. It also offers automation to help customers to recover their data quickly and minimize downtime.
However, it seems that only a limited selection of your data can be recovered to a small selection of cloud environments with little flexibility or the option to keep your IP address. Businesses may also in some instances experience vendor lock in when using Druva for their data protection needs. This solution can also be expensive, especially for large businesses.
What are the limitations of a one-cloud-only solution?
While single cloud recovery has advantages, such as cost savings and simplicity, there are some significant limitations you should consider before making this type of decision:
- Performance issues: You’re limited to a single provider when using one public cloud for backup and disaster recovery. This means you may not have access to the same resources or features that other providers offer, which could lead to slower response times and degraded performance during an outage or disaster.
- Downtime and financial losses: When you rely solely on one cloud provider, you’re dependent on their infrastructure and services. If there’s a cloud service outage, you may be unable to recover your data or applications, resulting in business disruption and lost revenue.
- Lack of flexibility: If your disaster recovery plan only supports recovery to a single cloud provider, you may not have the flexibility to choose another cloud provider or an on-premises environment for recovery.
Get started with true CPR™ – recover from any cloud to any cloud
Each cloud backup software solution compared in this article offers exclusive features for protecting, backing up and recovering data in the cloud. But the real difference lies in CPR’sTM ability to provide a solution when the public cloud service provider goes down.
With CPR,TM you have the ability to keep your private and public IP during failover and recovery, which makes the experience seamless and with little interruption or downtime. Critical processes like email, file sharing and accounting systems will remain operational without the need to switch to temporary systems. This is true cloud provider resilience.
It is important to choose a cloud service provider that offers a solution-based approach with multiple options for backup, DRaaS and replication and not a provider that will try to tie you to a single vendor’s solution. With CPRTM, you can recover from any cloud to any cloud, e.g., from AWS to Google Cloud or from Google Cloud to Azure.
This means, for example, that if you’re using AWS and it goes down like the AWS outage in 2021, you can use CPRTM to recover your data malware-free to any other public or private cloud or temporarily restore it to the Stage2Data private cloud until your original cloud environment are up and running again.
Final thoughts
The bottom line is that even if your business is hosted in the cloud, the core DR planning principles should not change. You should be able to recover from one cloud to another as you would have from your main office data center to a DRaaS environment. Not all servers and data are equally important, and you should choose a cloud service provider that allows for various RTOs and RPOs depending on the criticality of each server.
Geo-redundancy is not a disaster recovery grade, scalable RTO and RPO solution. These strategies will alleviate the traditional failures in current Hyperscaler deployments so your business can ensure its data remains secure and minimize the risk of data breaches or loss while also staying compliant with relevant regulations.
Don’t leave your cloud data vulnerable – safeguard it with Stage2Data’s Cloud Provider Resiliency (CPR)™ solution! Ensure your data is always available, secure, and recoverable in the face of ransomware attacks, cloud outages, or any disruptive events.
