Cloud Vs Traditional On Premise Data Recovery

Friday, May 23rd, 2014 at 7:57 pm -Posted by Rahul Songadkar

Business uptime is critical to an organizations growth and revenue. In my earlier blog we read about the importance ofData backup and recoveryand how a well drafted recovery plan helps in getting your systems up and running again quickly.

Typically businesses take a decision on an acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for their systems based on the financial impact that they may suffer due to system unavailability. There are many aspects that lead us to a selection of a data recovery mechanism and with advent of cloud base storage solutions, organizations are presented with more options for data recovery model with this in tow, let us compare data recovery in cloud witha traditional on premise datacenter.

FactorCloud Data RecoveryTraditional On Premise Data Recovery

Ease of Getting Started One just needs to configure services provided by cloud provider Deploying and Managing an on premise data recovery plan usually tends to be complex, requiring significant timeline, budgets and resources you might not have

Simplicity Simplified environment, reduced complexity of recovery

Improved recovery reliability by maximizing features of automation and cloud technologies, thus minimizing risk of failure to recover Building an all-inclusive data recovery plan can be complex when compared to cloud based recovery, irrespective of whether you do it yourself or outsource it to a service provider

Time Significantly shortened server recovery time Recovery time can range from couple of days to weeks

Cost Optimum utilization of resources, as the cloud service provider owns the hardware, businesses dont have to pay for idle machines

As mentioned above, there is no need to purchase huge infrastructure to store the r data, Cloud based data storage solutions enables small and midsize businesses to have the same RTO, RPO and security as any large organization, without having to deal with significant overheads. The significant upfront investments required to establish an on premise data center and recovery plan can force you to compromise on some parameters and thus leaving your system vulnerable at some points.

A secondary data recovery site to enable redundancy can drive upwards your costs in a major way, for example you would need an additional space, more manpower to manage the center, power and cooling bills etc.

Management Consistency Cloud providers simply have services setup which will take care of everything, you dont need to worry about day to day activities required to ensure data recovery objectives As the data recovery processes evolve continually, one needs to upgrade itself with new skill set on an ongoing basis to ensure data recovery objective compliance

Scalability Easily scalable as per your business needs Does not scale up or down easily

Response Time and Latency A CSP can store data in diverse locations far apart from each other according to his feasibility. This can give rise to latency issues

Cloud based storage solutions are not recommended for applications that demand high response times and low latency Mostly an organizations physical data recovery site is located at the nearest feasible location to ensure high response times and thus reducing latency issues

Application Compatibility With cloud based recovery service , one needs to ensure that their applications are compatible with the CSPs infrastructure

For example some applications may require a specific environment for them to run, which might not be available with the CSP For highly custom applications, one should opt for physical DR

Now since we have established that for most of the applications and requirements a cloud based data recovery service is better. Let us see some options for cloud data recovery.

Managed applications and managed DR In this option, one puts both primary production and disaster recovery instances in cloud and have them both managed by the CSP, With this one can derive and maximize the benefits of cloud computing such as pay as you go and eliminating infrastructure investments

Organizations choosing this option must select the CSP with due diligence and negotiate a service level agreement which is conducive for ones business objectives

Back up to and restore from the cloud This option is a substitute for tape based offsite backups. In this approach the applications and data remain on premise , with data being backed up on cloud regularly

When a disaster occurs, the data form cloud instance can be loaded on-premise and continue for the systems to continue functioning

Back up to and restore to the cloud Here, the data is stored in the cloud, but when the disaster occurs it isnt restored back on-premise, instead it is stored in virtual machines in the cloud and start serving your business from there, which can easily be achieved with Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud

Replication to virtual machines in the cloud This approach is suitable for applications/data which are critical to a business and cannot suffer from extended downtime.

These applications require a continuous data protection(CDP) to replicate changes in data immediately from on-premise to cloud

Cloud provides many options w.r.t your requirements and budget especially for small and medium sized businesses when compared to a traditional on premise data center. With growing adoption of cloud, we would see more customization in data storage and tight recovery time SLAs.

References:

http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/Disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud-explained

Philip Boothsays:

May 30, 2014 at 10:21 pmI find this post interesting to note about business uptime which depends on the key considerations like acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for their systems based on the financial impact that they may suffer due to system unavailability. I also find interesting about the cloud based data recovery service.There are many aspects that leads us to a selection of data recovery mechanism and with the advent of cloud based storage system,more organisations are moving towards it.

Cloud Data Back up And Recovery Plan Checklist

Friday, May 9th, 2014 at 7:54 pm -Posted by Rahul Songadkar

Data, whether its yours or your clients, small or large, on premise or in cloud, is pivotal to business growth. We are all familiar with theadvantagescloud based solutions bring to an organization in terms of flexibility, scalability and agility. However due to security concerns businesses are in a dilemma over data backup and recovery in cloud, as their confidential data will be handled by the cloud provider and they dont have full control over it. This is one major roadblock, we can say which restricts application migration and data backup in cloud.

Let us consider that you have developed an application dealing with numerous financial transactions on a regular basis (be it banking or ecommerce app with web and mobile access) by following all best practices and the application is performing well withgood number of concurrent users, handling security threats like cross site scripting, DoS attacks etc. And you deploy the application on worlds leading cloud datacenter provider, say AWS, Azure, Rackspace etc. who provides the best security for your data with the best antivirus, appropriate firewall settings, providing communication over a secured channel, encrypted drives and what not. Your application is generating millions of critical transaction records which enables you to function and provide service to your customers and also gain interesting insights about them.

Now consider a situation when the datacenter location is compromised be it due to a natural calamity, a severe power outage, hardware failure or data security breach. Also apart from these calamatic situations, there are many more instances when you can lose access to your data either temporarily or forever. Following are some of the data loss situations across IAAS, SAAS, PAAS and Cloud Storage in cloud

Overwriting of logical volume

Data files getting overwritten

Files getting deleted accidentally

Logical volume or partition getting deleted

Data volume accidentally reformatted

Corruption in Snapshot management

Database getting dropped

Tables getting dropped

Row data getting deleted

Corruption in system table

Database file getting corrupted

What will be your reaction if there is no backup and recovery plan in place?Think how long your business can survive without being able to access your precious data? Your digital empire, which you had built with hardwork over the years will crumble in very less time.

One cannot stress enough on the importance of data recovery for your business, with the right data recovery policy in place you can ensure a steady stream of revenue, enhanced customer satisfaction, ensuring legal and regulatory compliance and overall maintain your brand reputation.

Before Planning Cloud Data Recovery, following are some points to ponder over which will help you in avoiding some above mentioned situations

Discuss and design a recovery policy with the cloud provider

Any legal or regulatory compliance required to be met for your application and whether the cloud service provider(CSP) is able to meet these, for example HIPPA in case of healthcare applications

Data encryption requirement

Determine total cost of ownership (TCO) of data

Know where your data is going

Insist on an acceptable recovery window

Seek out other client opinions and reviews

Ask what will happen to your data if you go dark

Ask if they provide secured multi location distributed file systems with data redundancy

Do they have redundant power connections and providers

Does the cloud service provider has HDD or Tape backup

Has your data been securely transferred and stored in the cloud?

Various Authentication options available for users- two factor model present?

The cloud providers reliability in terms of its availability and ability to serve your users in the event of a disaster

In the next blog post in this series, we will discuss about Cloud Vs Traditional On Premise Data Recovery and the various cloud data recovery options.

References:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/magazineContent/Blueprint-for-cloud-based-disaster-recovery

How SQL Server Audit Feature Helps in Data Security Management

Friday, June 6th, 2014 at 11:44 pm -Posted by Vivek Karode

Data Security has rightly been among the top 5 priorities for CIOs for many straight years.And nowadays with rise in building of applications having large user bases across the globe has resulted in dynamic data usage patterns. Access routes have been increased to accommodate these patterns, and will continue to do so. In this scenario making sure whether you business data is secure is pivotal to your growth.

With rise in cloud based and 3rd party storage solutions, adhering to data security standards and compliance requirements around the globe, makes this problem statement further challenging.

One of the very important aspects of data security management is to ensure appropriate security controls are applied at the coredatabase level. The level of security required can be governed by the level of sensitive data handled by the application. For example, an application dealing with Customers personal data and or financial data would require more stringent security controls as compared to an application that deals with non-financial data.

The applications need to be strong enough to hold fast to various data security related constraints by having all the layers of application architecture secure enough. To bring robustness in your architecture for data security, it is very important to have regular audit features at the database level for various events e.g. access patterns, potential security breaches, malicious or unauthorized attempt to access data, potential weaknesses in applications that may lead to breach in data security.

Audit Features in SQL Server helps in addressing these concerns and in making the data security policy robust.

SQL Server Audit offers various advantages and features in term of Security

With SQL Server one can conduct audit in two ways, one is, Instance level and other one is, database level. For some cases we can define audit process at both levels.

SQL Server audit is fast and lightweight as compared to SQL Server profiler trace file. Because SQL Server engine automatically manage the Audit event features and we can schedule a job for audit.

The setup of SQL Server audit can be very easy and manageable. By using T-SQL or Management Studio we can easily configure the SQL Server audit feature.

Capture daily activities: In daily routine we are performing many activities on database level i.e. DML and DDL operations. We can capture all these activities in audit log. If management wants to monitor DBAs activities it can perform the audit job on both levels. We can capture and record individual user and object level audit logs.

Viewing audit logs: we can view audit log on SQL Server itself or if required store physical hard copy of the logs, on disk and import them from the disk to SQL server for analyzing the audit logs as and when required.

Limitations of SQL Server Audit

Every coin has two sides, with benefits comes limitations. Here are the aspects which we can consider as SQL server audit limitations:

As mentioned earlier, when SQL Server runs an audit job, most of the resources are used behind the scene, hence audit jobs only run when required from security point of view and not on regular basis.

Its difficult to manage multiple instance audits from one centralized location. If required we need to write some scripts for that.

Audit logs track each event at user level and object level. If we want to filter some events, this task has to be performed manually.

We can view audit logs in audit viewer only. There is no inbuilt, up to mark report available. If required we have to use SQL Server Reporting Services for that.

In a nutshell, Audit is a tool that allows Database administrators to capture all the events which were performed on Database Server. My recommendation is, if you dont want to purchase any third party utility for Security of your database, you can easily accomplish the same with Audit Feature.