What is your cloud data backup strategy ?

Did any of you think about how will we respond to a situation if our entire business data got wiped out from cloud data center?

What's our Plan B in such cases ? Are we really prepared and ready to face it ?

Everyone has to revisit cloud backup strategy for worst case scenarios. Do you know that recently an incident happened in Google Cloud that it mistakenly wiped off an entire client's private workspace including the client's entire data backup because of a misconfiguration. Client's business data worth is ~ 125billion.

Article : reference

How did they recover ? Luckily this client had backup's backup in a different cloud vendor / data center using which they came back online. It took them a week.

If we don't have a clear data backup strategy defined, then it's crystal clear that our business is simply sitting on a bomb waiting to explode.

Below are my strategic thought regarding data backup. Feel free to enter yours for safe business in the comment below,

Rigorous data backup can be done based on below strategies.

• Clear data classification of every application and its data. Ex: public, internal, classified, restricted.
• Clear communication with users and documentation about backup strategies and direction from leadership team.
• Optimize backup strategy based on
  1. data retention policy,
  2. how frequent we might access,
  3. how frequent we update or read it back,
  4. Backup data center geographic location,
  5. Data backup storage disk type (hardware),
  6. Backup storage size
• Data-at-rest encryption plays a vital role with data security.
• Optimize data retrieval plan based on data classification and carefully evaluate business impact when needed.
• Real time monitoring, reports and alerts on data backup jobs. * How often are we doing the backup and how often are we deleting the backup based on retention policy ? This is a deep question.
• Thorough review and sign off on the deleted data reports by corresponding application owners.
• Data backup cost comparison between cloud vendor vs on-prem data center will give practical ideas and ways to optimize data backup plan.
• Regular planned switch over to Disaster recovery environment data center and allow the application to run on it for few months will give practical experience to entire engineers to have a safe environment to practice what should be done during actual production failure major scenarios.
• Data backup access control plan and clear segregation of duties will safeguard from many manual errors.