Public cloud providers have greatly simplified the process of creating a backup, but the challenge has always been managing that at scale with things like policies for retention or simple granular file level restores or regulatory focused dashboards. This is the value added by many of the backup management solutions discussed in the following post and becomes critical once an environment scales past a few instances and databases.
The benefits of managed backup management are:
- Simplified Management - The backup management solutions offered by public cloud providers are generally account or subscription focused and doesn't offer a holistic view of the entire environment.
- Scalability - Fully managed backup and SaaS solutions have been built to scale to the largest environments without any performance impact or major concern for running out of storage space. This eliminates the need to re-architect the backup management deployment to scale with the needs of the organization for things such as keeping data for twice as long because of a new mandate.
- Multi-Cloud Support - Many of the legacy backup products that are available on the market only support backing up data to public cloud providers or only support backing up workloads in a single cloud provider. More and more companies are implementing multi-cloud strategies and a solution that supports multiple clouds is essential to simplifying operations.
Unmanaged Deployment
The following solutions are unmanaged deployments. This means that the software is available to be installed by the customer or has been packaged in the native cloud format such as an AWS AMI but is not available in one of the cloud provider's marketplace.
Rubrik Cloud Data Management
Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a software appliance that can be deployed to AWS, Azure and GCP. The Cloud Data Management platform supports policy based snapshot management along with advanced analytics to generate operational insights.
Managed Deployment
The following solutions are managed deployments. This means the backup management software company has added a deployment solution to the respective cloud provider's marketplace to allow the infrastructure to be provisioned with the click of a button.
Veritas CloudPoint
Veritas CloudPoint is a
backup management solution that supports automated deployment into Azure but supports backing up workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. In addition to IaaS workloads across the three major clouds CloudPoint also supports application level backups such as Microsoft SQL, MongoDB and AWS Aurora.
SaaS Deployment
The following solutions are Software as a Service (SaaS) deployments. This means the backup management software company hosts the software for its customers.
Druva Apollo
Druva Apollo is a SaaS solution that provides data protection of AWS EC2, RDS, S3, EBS, and Glacier. Druva Apollo also includes SLA-based snapshot retention policies in addition to tiering to reduce costs as older snapshots are moved to cheaper storage and eventually deleted.
Rubrik Polaris
Rubrik Polaris is a SaaS solution that integrates with Rubrik's Cloud Data Management hardware and software appliances to provide a unified management platform for both on-premises and cloud-based workloads.
CloudRanger Backup and Recovery
CloudRanger Backup and Recovery is a SaaS solution that provides backup management of AWS EC2, RDS, and Redshift instances using native AWS snapshots. Instance and file level backups are supported along with multi-region and multi-account backup restore points.
Fully Managed
The following solutions are fully managed backup management solutions such that the cloud provider manages backups on your behalf.
Built-in Snapshots
Public cloud providers allow administrators to create snapshots of virtual machine instances, databases, etc. This doesn't provide a robust feature set in terms of management but does allow administrators to backup and restore to a given point in time.
Backup management is an unsexy topic to most, but of course has tremendous value when there is a disaster. Many of the new backup management solutions are becoming much more than just creating a snapshot via the public cloud providers native snapshot APIs.
