How To Not Lose Your Data

Once again I’ll start by citing a very nice story that came out today. This time, it’s David Gewirtz at ZDNet writing about the data that was lost in the Amazon outage last week.

Gewirtz lays out some excellent advice for his readers, including something that I would like to expand upon. He suggests, “If all your data’s in the cloud, back up to a local environment.” This is a great idea, but not totally obvious to many businesses thinking about shifting their IT data centers to the cloud. Having backups, and backups of backups, is vital, and many companies will never feel safer than when they have one of those copies on their premises.

But Gewirtz highlights one reason more companies don’t do this when he exhorts, “If you don’t know how to back up those live databases, learn. If you don’t know how to extract data from your running systems, figure it out.”

I say, don’t bother to figure it out – let your cloud provider do it for you.

Enterprise cloud providers like nScaled see that this is an obstacle for cloud adoption and for having a rock solid backup / disaster recovery plan, so we’ve taken care of it, so our customers don’t have to. It’s hard to do frequent, top-to-bottom snapshots of multiple systems, and it requires some hairy technology.

The point of using cloud data centers is to reduce the IT burden, not increase it, especially in crucial (risk to company of data loss) but not strategic (doesn’t generate a business advantage) areas like backup.