Key Concerns for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Backup

Hybrid and multi-cloud models are being implemented by businesses as a way to improve flexibility in their backup and disaster recovery plans, among other reasons. When put in place correctly, hybrid and multi-cloud environments can be beneficial to a company. However, when deploying this type of cloud environment, there are a few concerns to address.

Like on-premises workloads, cloud workloads need to be protected. Snapshots from cloud providers only give as much protection as a snapshot from your on-premises virtualization infrastructure would; which is to say, not much protection at all.

Some cloud providers improve on that low level of protection by copying snapshots to a secondary data center located away from the primary center. With this approach, the data is in two geographically different places. However, because the data is not on two separate physical mediums, it still runs the risk of being lost. Additionally, the cloud provider is the one controlling the data.

To improve on this method, businesses could use cloud-to-cloud data protection in order to back workloads up from cloud provider to cloud provider. In doing this, these workloads are protected from infrastructure failure, datacenter loss, and problems that affect the cloud provider.

Cost can also be an issue with hybrid and multi-cloud models. Cloud providers can charge more to remove data from the cloud than to put data into it. Doing this makes moving data from cloud to cloud potentially very expensive. When dealing with this policy, a way to reduce costs is to run production workloads on cloud providers that are less expensive in terms of outbound data, and back the workloads up to a separate provider.

Though hybrid and multi-cloud environments could improve on data protection and cost, there are ways to work around them. What businesses need to assess is if the pros outweigh the cons, and if these problems are worth the effort of circumventing them.