What is Cloud Backup or Backup as a Service (BaaS)?

Cloud backup for the Enterprise Customer The iomart and Avamar Solution Data is the new oil. It is the fuel of modern day business. Data backup is therefore the key part of any disaster recovery plan. Executive Summary Data is the new oil. It is the fuel of modern day business. Data backup is therefore the key part of any disaster recovery plan, and is vital to business continuity. Historically Cloud backup services have been the preserve of SMEs and consumers, purely because of their smaller data needs. However advances in technology now mean that enterprise customers with large backup requirements can also take advantage of Cloud-based solutions and realise the same benefits of reduced capital expenditure and management costs and flexible provisioning of resources. Cloud-based Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions provide a way for enterprise-class organisations to future-proof their disaster recovery provisions, whilst keeping up with the ever-increasing volumes of data they store. By adopting the Cloud approach to backups, the cost savings of DR provisions can be realised year after year. What is Cloud Backup or Backup as a Service (BaaS)? In the past businesses would have used a library of magnetic tapes to take periodic data backups. These tapes would then be placed in a fireproof safe, preferably offsite, to add a further layer of resilience to the data protection plan. But as the volume of data held by enterprise-class businesses has grown, so too have storage needs. Aberdeen Research found that the average total size of current archives was 354TB for an enterprise-class organisation, growing at a rate of 12% year-on-year. IDC estimate that enterprises are expanding their storage capacity by more than 30% every year to cope with these demands. iomartcloud The CTO is now faced the challenge of balancing increased storage demands against the provision of backup capacity to keep data safe from loss. Backup as a Service (BaaS) uses the power and scalability of the Cloud to collect and store data backups. Rather than relying on ever-larger tape or disk arrays, backups are processed on site as normal and then transmitted directly to offsite storage facilities. Why are more businesses moving to Cloud Backup? According to the Tech Target and Computer Weekly 2014 IT Priorities survey, 40% of respondents see disaster recovery and business continuity as their key project in the next 12 months. Little surprise then that businesses are looking for strategic solutions to their current storage limitations. For most large organisations, BaaS simply makes good business sense. BaaS offers infinite storage potential without the capital costs associated with managing backup and disaster recovery provisions in house. The flexibility of BaaS provisioning means that organisations are able to quickly upscale services as their data backup needs change. Recent localised disasters, such as the widespread flooding during the winter of 2013-2014, have forced businesses to seriously consider the safety of data centres and backup sets. The obvious solution to avoiding local disasters is server co-location, but the high cost of creating redundant data centres is, in most cases, prohibitive. With efficient and cost effective Cloud backup services available, the cost of redundancy is also unjustifiable. Finally the speed of data backup and recovery is increasingly important as volumes of data continue to soar. The more data being held, the longer the backup and recovery process takes. The shift away from tape to

BaaS services allow you to increase and decrease storage resources as your needs change. Adopting this approach means never having to specify and buy backup software or hardware that will meet your future requirements. to disk has helped reduce backup routine execution times, but sorting through incremental backup sets for recovery is time consuming and arduous. When every second counts, traditional backup methods are becoming the weak link in enterprise backup and recovery plans. What are the benefits and challenges of BaaS? As with any outsourced service, there are several factors to consider before adoption. Factors in favour of BaaS adoption What are the potential benefits of BaaS to your organisation? Costs BaaS will significantly reduce capital expenditure inside the corporate data centre by doing away with the need to purchase additional storage and backup technology. Like other Cloud-based services, BaaS works on a pay-as-you-use charging model, so businesses only ever pay for the resources they actually use far cheaper than trying to build future-proofing into an onsite backup system. Redundancy BaaS provides redundancy by design. Data is transferred from your network to the Cloud, immediately providing one layer of redundancy. Writing data across redundant disk storage within a remote data centre then gives additional protection against loss, as do the in-house backup provisions. Finally, some providers will replicate backup sets between their distributed data centres creating yet another layer of protection against loss. Self-provisioning BaaS services allow you to increase and decrease storage resources as your needs change. Adopting this approach means never having to specify and buy backup software or hardware that will meet your future requirements future-proofing is the responsibility of the service provider. Businesses are fully in control of their own usage and provisioning, improving overall management of the service for their own needs. Frankly cost is only a small part of it. Companies are looking at flexibility. The flexibility to test more frequently and the ability to scale up or to scale down if needed. Those are the kinds of reasons clients are trying to introduce cloud into their environment. Richard Cocchiara, Managing Partner of Consulting for IBM s Business Continuity & Resiliency Services. Reduced IT estate By offloading backup systems to the Cloud, your enterprise immediately reduces the IT estate and frees up precious space in your data centre. This space saving is accompanied by a reduction in support, management and running costs, further underlining the financial benefits of BaaS. Where organisations already operate their own fail-over systems, even greater savings are available. 77% of organisations maintain their own recovery site, or rent space at a commercial facility for instance instantly redundant with a BaaS Cloud service. Challenges to BaaS adoption And why would some businesses choose to avoid BaaS? Security concerns Storing data outside the corporate firewall always raises concerns, mainly because the CIO and CTO must pass control of security over to the service provider. As well as providing enterprise-class storage facilities, BaaS providers protect their own data centres using enterprise-class security tools, backed by skilled security experts. Data stored using BaaS should then be at least as safe as data stored within your network. Transfer speeds Full backup sets are, by their very nature, large in size. Depending on the backup technology used, transfer of large files over leased lines can take a considerable length of time. During the transfer, other Internet-connected services may be adversely affected as the transfer consumes bandwidth. Gartner calculate that performing a 100GB backup and recovery operation over an average 8 Mbps Internet connection would take 23 hours - far in excess of what most organisations would consider acceptable. Compliance The third issue many businesses will want to address with offsite backups is compliance. Cloud storage facilities are often located abroad, creating legal issues where certain types of data are being transferred outside the UK or the EU. To avoid these problems, businesses will need to select BaaS providers who use UK-based data centres to host their operations. Reliability As with any outsourced function, the CIO will have concerns about reliability. What SLAs are in place to ensure timely assistance or system uptime? What technologies are used in the remote data centres to improve reliability overall? Again, the use of enterprise-grade systems by your BaaS provider should help to allay these concerns. Strategic concerns Despite most businesses planning to increase their use of the Cloud over the coming year, many are still unsure how such services fit into their wider business strategy. BaaS provides a solution to disaster recovery planning, but also requires some changes in the way that the IT infrastructure is rebuilt following a serious outage.

The Avamar backup system used by iomart performs client side data de-duplication so that only the changed blocks of a data set are replicated to the BaaS data centres. Why does the iomart enterprise solution work? As with any outsourced service, there are several factors to consider before adoption. There are a number of different Cloud BaaS services available, but few provide the benefits of EMC Avamar which has been specifically designed to tackle the concerns listed above. The iomart BaaS service is built on EMC Avamar to offer: De-duplication for improved storage space management and bandwidth performance Historically every full backup contains hundreds of thousands of files that were also copied in the previous full backup. Incremental backups were designed as a way to save tape space by only backing up the files that had been changed since the previous full backup. The Avamar backup system used by iomart performs client side data de-duplication so that only the changed blocks of a data set are replicated to the BaaS data centres. Every backup is then as small as possible, helping to: Reduce file transfer time. Reduce network bandwidth demands for backup transfer. Reduce storage consumption at the BaaS data centre, and thereby the service cost too. Reduce the size of the backup window to prevent knock-on effects on other network resources. Full synthetic backups The iomart de-duplication process is slightly different to a traditional incremental backup however. Rather than keeping a master backup copy, complemented by numerous incremental backup files, Avamar inserts file pointers where the duplicate files have been removed. These file pointers create a full synthetic backup which allow you to restore all the data you need from a single backup file. With Avamar there is no need to perform a standard, time-consuming incremental restore operation. You can't just keep backing up data the way you did before. You need more intelligence in the backup system. Backup software is moving up a level, and is becoming more of a catalogue and journaling of all the things in the protection storage tier. Wholly owned, UK-based infrastructure enhances compliance Many BaaS providers build on Cloud infrastructure provided by third parties with data centres situated outside the UK. By storing backup data in these services, organisations could be breaching UK and EU data protection laws. The iomart service is fully owned and located in the UK so that: All data backup data remains in the UK at all times, helping clients stay fully compliant with UK and EU law. End-to-end management of the entire system improves SLAs by reducing the number of parties involved. Local proximity to data centres further reduces the time required to transfer and restore backup sets over the Internet. Data centers that are 100 to 200 miles away tend to produce the best performance. Werner Zurcher, Gartner research director. Security Following de-duplication, all backup data is encrypted prior to transmission, via SSL, from your datacentre to ours. This dual layer of encryption prevents your data being intercepted on route, and it cannot be monitored once saved offsite. Backup data stored by iomart is further protected by enterprise-grade network security systems. The iomart data centres are all ISO 27001:2005, 20000:2011 and 9001:2008 accredited demonstrating our commitment to exception levels of information security and quality. These technical safeguards are backed by CRB-checked technical staff who are trained to handle customer data responsibly at all times. iomart is also registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) as required under the Data Protection Act 1998. Remote client support The agent-based nature of the Avamar solution allows your business to include remote assets as part of the backup routine with little or no additional intervention following initial set-up. The Avamar agent will trigger periodic backup jobs, ensuring that data stored or updated outside your corporate firewall is always protected from loss, and included in your standard disaster recovery plans. Mobile workers with laptops or employees working from home can all be protected as part of your new BaaS-backed DR regime. David Goulden, COO at EMC.

Partners can then focus on creating revenue from BaaS, without having to implement or manage the infrastructure supporting it. The iomart Portal a new BaaS channel model Conclusion Because businesses of any size can benefit from BaaS, iomart has created a channel model for partners to provide their own white label Cloud backup service. Using nothing more than a simple web portal, resellers can provide their customers with: Cloud backup services have now reached the required level of maturity and technical functionality to offer something of value to even the largest of organisations. With the right combination of tools and service provider, your enterprise could begin offloading responsibility for backups to the Cloud. Self-service recovery of files, folder or entire systems. Policy creation for datasets and retention. Backup usage statistics, history, and trends.backup success and failure job status. Agent deployment. One-click backup facilities. Daily verification of recoverability. Partners can then focus on creating revenue from BaaS, without having to implement or manage the infrastructure supporting it. To this end, iomart Portal also ships with built in billing and admin to streamline the service management process. Cost savings created by not having to plan for annual data size increases can now be recognised year-on-year indefinitely. These savings are further boosted by a reduction in physical hardware that needs to be supported, maintained and warrantied. BaaS technology has evolved and matured to the point where intelligent backup de-duplication has made it possible to transfer very large datasets offsite for storage. These advances mean that many of the common arguments against Cloud backups are no longer valid.

Bibliography (i) Who is Archiving in the Public Cloud? A Portrait of Cloud Archiving Programs Aberdeen Research http://blogs.aberdeen.com/it-infrastructure/ who-is-archiving-in-the-public-cloud-a-portrait-of-cloud-archiving-programs (v) Companies have high expectations for their disaster recovery plans TechTarget - http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/companies- have-high-expectations-for-their-disaster-recovery-test-plan (ii) Backup starts to scale out along with storage, data growth Network World http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/101513-backup-starts-toscale-out-274814.html (vi) Cloud Backup Assessment: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly SearchCloudSecurity - http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240184571/for-cloud-backup-and-disaster-recovery-bandwidth-proves-problematic (iii) 2014 Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT Priorities survey - http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240212471/disaster-recovery- and-virtual-serer-backup-top-2014-storage-projects (vii) EMC battles rogue backups Network World - http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/071013-emc-battles-rogue-271652.html (iv) Cloud computing causing rethinking of disaster recovery Network World http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/073013-cloud-computingdisaster-recovery-272370.html?page=2 (viii) Cloud Backup Assessment: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly SearchCloudSecurity - http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240184571/for-cloud-backup-and-disaster-recovery-bandwidth-proves-problematic Images for illustrative purposes only. iomart 2014. Lister Pavilion, Kelvin Campus, West of Scotland Science Park, Glasgow, G20 0SP