Almost every organization is migrating to the cloud to gain efficiencies and scale through digital transformation. Cloud plans and adoption have accelerated as a result of the pandemic. In fact, 92% of enterprises are considering a multi-cloud strategy for their organization, in part due to the adoption of more cloud-based applications to meet remote work needs.
As a result of the shift toward multiple cloud platforms, organizations must be able to easily and thoroughly protect and recover data in business-critical applications, virtual servers, and databases across multiple cloud environments. They are looking for ways to improve data and business resilience to achieve a successful digital transformation without creating new vulnerabilities and risks.
The move toward public cloud, plus heightened concerns over ransomware, and complexities associated with backup and data management are forcing IT leaders to reevaluate their traditional backup infrastructure. They realize that it’s time to explore alternative, modern solutions that provide deeper and infinitely scalable protection for their multi-cloud environments.
The accelerated growth of cloud data
Organizations are facing unprecedented challenges storing and managing data — greater amounts of data and also different types across multiple clouds. At the same time, workloads have become more complex and varied (lift-and-shift, cloud-native), making it harder to optimize data protection costs across multiple cloud deployments, which translates to additional management, infrastructure, and resourcing costs.
Having more workloads running across multiple cloud platforms, often in complex deployments across public clouds, as well as SaaS applications, can result in escalating costs due a lack of centralized visibility.
Unchecked data = Data silos, data sprawl, and management complexity
The lack of cloud skills is stifling progress
The cloud skills shortage is also slowing enterprises’ progress to deploy new technology quickly. In fact, Gartner reported that IT executives see the talent shortage as the largest barrier to deploying emerging technologies, mostly cloud-based technologies such as databases, serverless, machine learning, containers, advanced storage, and analytics. In many cases, there is a lack of awareness around the shared responsibility models of the various cloud platforms now being utilized (data, networks, applications, and operating systems — anything they own that lives in the cloud) and the potential impact. Many companies are under-prepared to face potential data loss situations from accidental deletion, data corruption, ransomware encryption, and malicious insider/external attacks. In addition, there is the added business risk of non-compliance with regulatory mandates such as the GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA which could result in significant fines, damaged brand reputation, business disruption, and revenue losses.
So how can you meet these challenges head on? Let’s take a look at our five tips for building a successful multi-cloud backup strategy.
Five tips for building a successful multi-cloud backup strategy
1. Consolidate your cloud backup vendors
Using different backup vendors for each and every cloud platform can result in a lack of centralized visibility across all cloud data. Fragmented point solutions can quickly lead to data silos and failed SLAs. This fragmentation also results in a greater risk of backups being deleted by ransomware or insiders, data loss due to failed backups, and/or security breaches. Also, using many backup products across your cloud environment makes centralized reporting and compliance difficult. It’s important to consolidate the number of vendors you use to protect globally distributed data across multiple cloud platforms easily, consistently, and affordably.
2. Centralize data operations in the cloud
Improve business resiliency with greater reliability, security, and accessibility to data. By centralizing data operations in the cloud, you can utilize value-add services such as cloud disaster recovery, sensitive data governance, eDiscovery, and defensible deletion. This will help you do more with your backup data, and turn it into a business intelligence asset.
3. Automate cloud tasks wherever possible
One of the main ways automation can benefit your organization is by reducing labor and IT resource needs. Even if there is a lack of cloud skills within your organization, you won’t have to use these limited IT resources on tasks that can easily be automated. Using automation is an efficient option for completing many of your cloud-based data resilience requirements with almost infinite scale, so your IT team can focus on more value-add activity to support your business and its growth.
4. Cloud-native helps to make infrastructure management effortless
Whether it’s offered as-a-service or delivered via subscription, how a vendor implements its software in the cloud impacts your management costs. It may appear to be less expensive to buy a particular company’s product and lift-and-shift it into your cloud account; however, all-inclusive services in the vendors’ cloud account tend not to be very cost effective, particularly when both services and storage are covered. It’s important to assess all costs you will incur. In addition to the cost of VMs and block storage, you are also responsible for maintaining and upgrading these systems. You will have to protect and monitor them for cyber attacks and ransomware, immediately patching them when vulnerabilities are addressed. If and when a patch for such things impacts the performance of your VMs, you will also be responsible for figuring out how to address that performance difference. All hidden costs should be taken into consideration. As you seek to enable agility and better data resilience, the advantages of a cloud-native solution become clear and compelling.
5. Align with your organization’s cloud-first strategy
Simplify business operations by integrating with partners and extending data protection policies into your existing cloud IT solution stack.
Data is an asset in today’s multi-cloud world. With the changing digital landscape and emerging mobile workplace, managing business and employee data has become a key trust factor for organizations. By plugging into API-based ecosystem integrations, IT teams can tap into new sources of data, improve existing business processes, and reuse existing skills and resources to automate business processes. Some examples include:
- Exterro for simplifying eDiscovery and information governance
- Okta for single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- ADFS for authenticating users and SSO
- ServiceNow for a centralized ticketing system
- Palo Alto Networks for security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)
Conclusion
At the core of any successful digital transformation to the cloud, there’s a fundamental need for application and data resilience. Whether protecting cloud-native, lift-and-shift, or SaaS applications, organizations are seeking an easier and more cost effective way to manage, protect, and secure data wherever it lives.
Druva is the only cloud-native 100% SaaS leader that can manage, govern, and protect data across multiple cloud environments — supporting not just backup and recovery but also high value-add use cases such as eDiscovery, sensitive data governance, ransomware, and security. No other vendor can match Druva for customer experience, infinite scale, orchestrated DRaaS, true data immutability, and ransomware protection.
With Druva, you get peace of mind knowing that you will always have secure, air-gapped backup data you can recover, no matter the source. Through a single unified platform, you can seamlessly protect fragmented, diverse data with limitless scale, across public cloud, as well as business-critical SaaS applications.
Want to learn more about how to easily and affordably protect your multi-cloud data? Join us for Druva’s 2022 Multi-Cloud Data Resilience Virtual Summit to learn best practices from experts and industry leaders including AWS, Nutanix, and ESG. Register for free here.