Is cloud backup repatriation right for your organization?
More and more organizations are making the move to bring backup data back on-site, but the cloud is still a widely-used resource. Is repatriation in the cards for you?
Between rising cloud costs and concerns about data availability, repatriation has become a major part of the cloud discussion.
Cloud repatriation brings data and infrastructure off the cloud and back into a data center. A company might not own the physical data center it repatriates into, but the move away from cloud grants many organizations a deeper level of control over the hardware, software, design decisions and infrastructure in general.
When it comes to data backups, repatriation can alleviate concerns about meeting legal requirements and retention periods, and avoid creating and storing extraneous copies of data that might increase costs and drain resources.
The cloud is not likely to go anywhere as a backup target, but there are several reasons to consider repatriating that data back on site, including security concerns, data availability, support and, of course, cost. Read on to learn why more organizations are participating in cloud repatriation.
Security
Using the cloud requires a business to give its most valuable item, its data, to a third-party provider. This is a daunting prospect, since even major cloud operations have been breached, some multiple times. Often, there is very little comeback due to the signed legal agreements.
Bringing data backup in-house means that the business controls all aspects and is responsible for their own security. At the same time, they don't incur the liability of the cloud provider misconfiguration, losing data.
The data becomes less publicly available in a private data center with dedicated connectivity since it is no longer sat on a shared resource, be it a database or a tertiary service.
Repatriation takes data backup private again. At the same time, the responsibility to protect that data is now the company's alone, for better or worse.
Availability
As recent outages have shown, infrastructure availability is becoming a significant issue with most big providers experiencing outages that span several hours of downtime from a single incident.
With a cloud-based environment, all a company can do is wait until the outage is fixed by the cloud provider. On the other hand, maintaining access to your own physical infrastructure means that the ability to fix most items is brought back within company control. In-house backup and restore operations are no longer at the mercy of a cloud provider. Access to storage is localized and no longer a shared resource.
Support
Moving to smaller data centers can also make support and management easier. Unlike cloud behemoths like AWS, smaller vendors and personnel managing local data centers don't have a million clients to satisfy. If an organization needs support quickly, it is more likely to get a response from a smaller/closer provider.
Cost
Cost is, without a doubt, one of the major reasons for repatriation. Cloud providers have touted the affordability of the cloud over physical data storage, but getting the most bang for your buck from using the cloud requires due diligence to keep costs down.
Even major corporations struggle with this issue. The bigger the environment, the more complex it is to accurately model and cost, particularly with multi-cloud environments. And as we know, cloud is incredibly easy to scale up.
Keeping with our data theme, understanding the costing model of data backup and bringing back data from deep storage is extremely expensive when done in bulk. Software must be expertly tuned to use the provider storage tier stack efficiently, or massive costs can be incurred.
On-premises, the storage costs are already sunk. The data is also local (assuming local backup with remote replication for offsite backup,) so restoring data and services happens quicker.
Using local infrastructure frees up companies from the whims of cloud vendor price rises and provides predictability in costs.
The downside is that capital expenditure will have to grow to meet the requirements of the business. With cloud environments, you do pay more, but it is billed as operational expenditure, not capital expenditure.
To repatriate or not to repatriate?
We have talked about the drawbacks of cloud-based backup, but there are still some benefits that make it a useful tool. It comes down to making intelligent business decisions.
Straight-up backup to the cloud can be cheaper and more effective than on-site backups. It also passes a good portion of the management overhead to the cloud provider, such as hardware support, general maintenance and backup security.
As we discussed, however, putting backups in another provider's hands might mean longer response and recovery times.
Smaller businesses often have an immature environment and cloud backup can be a boon, but larger businesses might consider repatriation if the infrastructure for on-site is available. However, the most important factor is that self-managed tools require technical expertise to be effective. If an organization wants to bring cloud data backups on site, it must make sure that it has the personnel, resources and support to do so.
Stuart Burns is an enterprise Linux administrator at a leading company that specializes in catastrophe and disaster modeling.
