Enterprises located all over the world are still terrified to store their data on public clouds and this is mainly due to security concerns. But in a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research, it was revealed that these public IP Storage platforms are viable for backups and disaster recovery.
In February this year, around 209 database backup and DR professionals from North America, Asia and Europe were invited to take part in the survey. In this survey which was commissioned by Microsoft, Noel Yuhanna–a Forrester analyst said that organizations should strategically consider using public cloud services for scenarios involving backup and disaster recovery.
Noel estimated that around 15% of companies were currently performing database backups in cloud and this was a figure which has doubled in the last year. The main reason for the increased usage of Public clouds was said to be the growth in data and the need for an application which is available all the time and is economically viable too.
The survey revealed that more than 70% of enterprises have more than 2TB of data to deal with and in the next few years the data will grow to petabytes capacity. Noel admitted that 90% of data was created in the last two years and from that around 3.5 zeta bytes of data resides on the public cloud.
Noel said that he knew one organization which had 50k databases to manage and just 2k of them were considered critical.
According to the survey, the top challenges to use the cloud for backup and DR purposes were storage management-41%, securing backups-40% and automated backups and recovery 34%. Yuhanna explained that it can be complex to perform backups and encrypt them to the cloud. But if cloud backups and disaster recovery solutions are considered, it becomes really simple as encryption is already included into the backup process. The other benefit in using cloud storage is to conduct more frequent backups, redundancy and no limits on storage and seamless management.
The top three reasons stated in the survey for using public cloud for backups are 1.) Saving money on storage costs (61% of respondents admitted) 2.) Requirement for frequent backups (50 percent) 3.) Saving administrative costs (50 percent). The survey also confirmed that cloud was being used for multiple tier-2 backups.
When the topic of public cloud concerns erupted; Noel commented that security has been less of a concern today when compared with a few years ago. Also reliability of cloud services has increased and that is mainly due to the use of faster fiber connections, which offered the flexibility to backup large databases in a consistent way.
Supporting this theory, many among the survey respondents admitted that they were backing 20TB of data every day without any issues.
Debbie Lyons, a senior product manager with Microsoft’s SQL Server Group, added a few comments to the talk. She said that all new versions of SQL server are capable of holding direct backups and that too with the flexibility of availing the privilege of paying only for the storage utilized and that too with automatic data georeplication, along with data encryption.
