What is cloud-native backup and recovery?

Why enterprises need cloud-native backup environments

Cloud-native backup and recovery platforms accommodate many of the expanding and evolving data protection demands of modern business operations. Although business needs vary dramatically, several solid rationales for cloud-native backup adoption exist, including the following:

• Cloud-first strategies. More organizations currently practice cloud-native or cloud-first app dev, designing applications specifically for cloud deployment. This involves advanced application architectures, such as microservices, along with flexible and highly scalable software components invoked as needed and only for short durations. Seamless backup and recovery services provide a simple and effective cloud-first business resolution.
• Integration. Cloud-native backup and recovery services use existing cloud features, such as monitoring, storage and security. These varied cloud services are proven to work reliably together.
• Automation. Clouds rely on APIs for interoperability between services and extensively use automation to streamline different types of activities, including backups. Automation dramatically reduces human intervention and any subsequent human errors in these processes.
• Security. Cloud-native backup services support powerful security capabilities, from immutable backups -- perhaps using blockchain services -- to logical air-gapped backups. This delivers stronger protection against advanced threats, such as ransomware. Cloud providers also offer data loss prevention (DLP) services, denying access to tagged or sensitive data without proper authorization.
• Compliance. A mix of cloud backup security and DLP services vastly improves any organization's regulatory compliance posture, addressing not only these obligations but also business continuity and risk management concerns.
• Disaster recovery (DR). Clouds are resilient and offer geographical separation that enhances protection against major disasters such as floods and earthquakes, as well as more common issues such as hardware failures.
• Scalability. Cloud providers furnish enormous amounts of resources -- storage, for instance -- permitting a cloud-native backup to accommodate vast quantities of business content without traditional investments in local networks, computing or storage.

Key capabilities of cloud-native backup and recovery

Backup software tools routinely offer a wealth of features, but cloud-native backup and recovery platforms provide many advanced capabilities:

• Integrity. Backups are useless if they're incomplete, corrupted or damaged and cannot be recovered. Data integrity features support successful backups that contain all required data and meet validation checks. If corruption or other problems are detected during backup, integrity features will self-repair to remediate any issues, often with a high degree of automation.
• Security. Cloud-native backup and recovery platforms embrace the critical importance of security for backup data. These platforms support capabilities such as immutability, often based on blockchain or other distributed ledger technology. Logical air gapping is another cloud-native feature, isolating backup environments from ransomware attacks. Additional security features include detailed logs and auditing capabilities, data encryption and strong authentication with role-based access control (RBAC) and multifactor authentication.
• Recovery. Cloud backup and recovery platforms offer rapid data recovery capabilities based on common technologies, such as snapshots and continuous data protection. These techniques underpin an enterprise's ability to restore lost data and resume operations quickly, further supporting business continuity.
• Automation. Cloud-native backup and recovery platforms regularly use automation to perform backups and restorations with minimal human intervention. This reduces human error, ensures consistent backups and supports DR. Traditional scripts, selectable workflow features or -- most common in the cloud -- API-driven automation permit seamless interaction between the backup platform and other cloud provider services.
• Cross-cloud. Cloud backup and recovery typically supports both multi-region and cross-cloud requirements. Successful multi-region deployments ensure backup independence and redundancy across multiple cloud regions. Cross-cloud support accommodates multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies and offers businesses flexibility in cloud storage alternatives.
• Awareness. Cloud-native backup and recovery raises awareness for prevailing infrastructures and operational situations, including container-aware and VM-aware backups. These backups ensure containers and virtual machines include any required dependencies, supporting successful restorations. By comparison, application-consistent backups capture application states and data sets that permit restoration, if required, to a known or consistent state. Similarly, software as a service (SaaS) data protection focuses on SaaS applications and ensures restoration of SaaS data.

Use cases and real-world applications

Cloud-native backup and recovery platforms support a range of enterprise applications and tasks. The following are some common use cases.

Traditional backups to the cloud

Any backup must protect data from loss through theft, destruction or other harm. Traditional backups emphasize not only creating a copy of the data -- the backup itself -- but securing that backup in another physical location to safeguard it remotely. Cloud-native backups also create separation, or logical air gapping, by providing an effective off-site backup for any enterprise. However, data egress, or moving data out of the cloud, often incurs fees.

Application development

App dev is often a vital element of competitive differentiation, aiding businesses in creating portals, offering online services, accessing records and interacting with customers in creative ways. App dev relies on a complex continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline to develop and test software. Cloud resources and services, including platforms as a service, make the cloud an attractive environment for app dev. Moreover, cloud backups protect code in development, holding test data and results, as well as supporting applications deployed to production.

Containers and microservices

Cloud-native applications are designed and developed using scalable modular architectures, including containers organized into microservices applications. Microservices spin up and manage clusters of containers using orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, requiring close attention throughout the process. But cloud-native backups effectively protect Kubernetes clusters in production environments.

Cloud-based enterprise applications

Cloud providers now offer a wealth of vital services, from database applications such as Apache Cassandra or MongoDB to machine learning platforms. These complex services routinely handle vast quantities of data. While a cloud provider establishes a resilient storage environment to protect customer data, that provider cannot safeguard against all vulnerabilities, such as accidental deletion or malicious acts. Cloud-native backups offer a seamless means of protecting data for critical enterprise applications in the cloud.

Disaster recovery for cloud-native applications

Cloud providers are susceptible to unforeseen events: forces of nature, acts of war or the consequences of human mistakes. Outages occur, sometimes for extended periods. Cloud backup and recovery, vital to resuming operations, aids providers in speeding up the DR process. Common DR strategies include multiple availability zone deployments, georedundancy and immutable infrastructure approaches to application deployment.

Challenges and considerations

Despite the benefits, cloud-native backup and recovery poses challenges an enterprise must carefully weigh before adopting the technology. Common considerations include the following:

• Lack of security features. Not all cloud-based tools provide advanced security features, such as air gapping and immutability. Evaluate each tool's feature set carefully and be certain the chosen cloud-based platform meets business needs. Similarly, not all features are enabled by default. Ensure required security features are both enabled and functional.
• Insider acts. Human errors and malicious activity undermine backup security. For example, if data is accidentally deleted before it's backed up, any restoration will not contain that deleted data. Communicate proper data access and management principles to all employees. Comprehensive access logs track changes, when they were made and by whom.
• Compliance. Although backups are essential to any enterprise compliance strategy, data sovereignty and storage location issues remain. Some industries prohibit backing up sensitive content to a cloud, especially when operating in cross-cloud or multi-region environments. Review compliance standards and ensure the adopted platform meets current requirements.
• Data costs. There are two major components to cloud-native backup storage: capacity and egress. Backup storage capacity costs spiral as backups are added and retained over time. Snapshot backups, too, consume substantial amounts of storage capacity. Finally, cloud providers charge to send data from the cloud back to the local data center, so restoring local data from a cloud backup is often costly.
• Insecure APIs and networks. Cloud backup and recovery platforms provide extensive security features. However, they remain susceptible to security vulnerabilities from common oversights, such as using insecure APIs that do not require authentication or transmitting backup data over an unencrypted Wi-Fi connection.
• Scope. Both the reach and available features of cloud-native backup platforms are often limited, especially if backing up a complex local or hybrid infrastructure. For example, a particular cloud-native tool is unable to back up a hybrid cloud or a local Kubernetes environment involving multiple clusters. This underscores the need for comprehensive testing and validation of specific use cases before adoption.
• Multi-cloud complexity. Differences in APIs and architectures complicate backups and restorations across multiple cloud environments, particularly if a cloud backup platform is built around one specific cloud provider and set of services. Again, testing and performance validation are essential when considering cloud-native tools for cross-cloud tasks.

Enterprise cloud-native backup tools

Numerous cloud-native tools support enterprise-class backup and recovery. A cross-section of popular cloud-based backup tools includes but is not limited to the following:

• Acronis Cyber Protect Enterprise.
• AWS Backup and Restore Services.
• Azure Backup.
• Cohesity Cloud backup and recovery.
• Commvault Cloud.
• Druva Data Security Cloud.
• Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Service.
• HYCU Data Resiliency Cloud.
• Rubrik Zero Trust Data Protection.
• Veeam Data Cloud.
• Veeam Data Platform.
• Veeam Google Backup & Recovery.

The choice among cloud-native backup and recovery platforms requires close scrutiny of many factors:

• Supported cloud environments. Understand which cloud platforms are supported, including AWS, Azure or Google.
• Supported data types. Identify which data types must be protected, including database files, VM files or containers.
• Supported workloads. Determine which workloads are supported, from structured query language databases to enterprise resource planning platforms.
• Security and compliance. Ensure the cloud backup platform provides the features needed to support security and compliance requirements, including encryption, air gapping and RBAC among others.
• RPO and RTO. Understand the acceptable recovery point objective, which represents tolerable data loss, as well as the acceptable recovery time objective, which is the time required to restore a backup.
• Performance and scalability. Ensure the cloud backup platform not only operates and integrates as required but also supports future backup growth.
• Cost. Licensing fees, storage capacity costs -- especially storage egress -- and management costs for cloud-native backup services add up quickly.