Data Protection: Tiering Backups to Cloud


Combines disk and tape storage with replication to cloud, ensuring maximum data safety and cost-efficiency.

Intro 

While backups often do not get the attention they need, it’s when a disaster strikes when backups are worth their weight in gold. Business data is of critical value and backups are the last resort to put your business back on track when a disaster occurs. Nowadays, with the ever-increasing number of potential threats to your business data, storing a single backup copy is not enough and a 3-2-1 or/and other variations of this rule should be followed.   

Problem 

The 3-2-1 backup rule requires one of the data copies to be stored offsite (air-gaped) to protect your data against both natural disasters and ransomware. However, maintaining an offsite backup, for example, on physical tapes might simply be out of the budget and a business might lack technical expertise to deal with physical tapes. 

Disk capacities are growing in size and keeping backups on them is affordable but disk storage lacks the security of tapes.   

Finally, public cloud storage with object locking dramatically increases protection against ransomware while archive tiers provide inexpensive storage for backup in cloud. But it needs a gateway to upload backups to cloud. 

Solution 

StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) provides a cost-efficient way to secure your backup copies by storing them in a tape format and uploading them to public or private cloud as an offsite location, following the 3-2-1 backup rule: a third backup copy on a different storage media that is kept offsite.    

StarWind VTL also allows you to combine cost-efficient disk storage with the security of a tape format by allowing to configure WORM policies (Write Once Read Many) and flexible retention for your secondary backup copies.  

Finally, StarWind VTL acts as a cloud gateway, offloading backup copies to all well-known public cloud providers such as Azure Blob, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi or to any S3-compatible object storage to maximize your backup copies safety.  

Conclusion 

StarWind VTL allows you to implement golden 3-2-1 backup rule, enabling you to not only rely on the local storage, but also have a flexible placement of your secondary backup increasing the ability to restore data in the case of disasters.