Cloud Vs Traditional On Premise Data Recovery

Friday, May 23rd, 2014 at 7:57 pm - Posted by Rahul Songadkar

Business uptime is critical to an organizations growth and revenue. In my earlier blog we read about the
importance of Data backup and recovery and how a well drafted recovery plan helps in getting your systems up
and running again quickly.
Typically businesses take a decision on an acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a Recovery Point
Objective (RPO) for their systems based on the financial impact that they may suffer due to system unavailability.
There are many aspects that lead us to a selection of a data recovery mechanism and with advent of cloud base
storage solutions, organizations are presented with more options for data recovery model with this in tow, let us
compare data recovery in cloud with a traditional on premise datacenter.

Factor

Ease of Getting Started

Simplicity

Time

Cost

Cloud Data Recovery

One just needs to configure services
provided by cloud provider
Simplified environment, reduced
complexity of recovery
Improved recovery reliability by
maximizing features of automation and
cloud technologies, thus minimizing risk of
failure to recover
Significantly shortened server recovery
time
Optimum utilization of resources, as the
cloud service provider owns the hardware,
businesses dont have to pay for idle
machines
As mentioned above, there is no need to
purchase huge infrastructure to store the r
data, Cloud based data storage solutions
enables small and midsize businesses to
have the same RTO, RPO and security as
any large organization, without having to
deal with significant overheads.

Traditional On Premise Data

Recovery
Deploying and Managing an on
premise data recovery plan usually
tends to be complex, requiring
significant timeline, budgets and
resources you might not have
Building an all-inclusive data
recovery plan can be complex when
compared to cloud based recovery,
irrespective of whether you do it
yourself or outsource it to a service
provider
Recovery time can range from
couple of days to weeks
The significant upfront
investments required to establish an
on premise data center and recovery
plan can force you to compromise
on some parameters and thus leaving
your system vulnerable at some
points.
A secondary data recovery site to
enable redundancy can drive
upwards your costs in a major way,
for example you would need an
additional space, more manpower to
manage the center, power and
cooling bills etc.

 Cloud providers simply have services

setup which will take care of everything,
Management Consistency you dont need to worry about day to day
activities required to ensure data recovery
objectives
Easily scalable as per your business
Scalability
needs
A CSP can store data in diverse
locations far apart from each other
according to his feasibility. This can give
Response Time and
rise to latency issues
Latency
Cloud based storage solutions are not
recommended for applications that demand
high response times and low latency
With cloud based recovery service , one
needs to ensure that their applications are
compatible with the CSPs infrastructure
Application Compatibility For example some applications may
require a specific environment for them to
run, which might not be available with the
CSP

As the data recovery processes

evolve continually, one needs to
upgrade itself with new skill set on
an ongoing basis to ensure data
recovery objective compliance
Does not scale up or down easily
Mostly an organizations physical
data recovery site is located at the
nearest feasible location to ensure
high response times and thus
reducing latency issues

For highly custom applications,

one should opt for physical DR

Now since we have established that for most of the applications and requirements a cloud based data recovery
service is better. Let us see some options for cloud data recovery.
Managed applications and managed DR
In this option, one puts both primary production and disaster recovery instances in cloud and have them both
managed by the CSP, With this one can derive and maximize the benefits of cloud computing such as pay as you
go and eliminating infrastructure investments
Organizations choosing this option must select the CSP with due diligence and negotiate a service level
agreement which is conducive for ones business objectives
Back up to and restore from the cloud
This option is a substitute for tape based offsite backups. In this approach the applications and data remain
on premise , with data being backed up on cloud regularly
When a disaster occurs, the data form cloud instance can be loaded on-premise and continue for the systems
to continue functioning
Back up to and restore to the cloud
Here, the data is stored in the cloud, but when the disaster occurs it isnt restored back on-premise, instead it
is stored in virtual machines in the cloud and start serving your business from there, which can easily be
achieved with Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud
Replication to virtual machines in the cloud
This approach is suitable for applications/data which are critical to a business and cannot suffer from
extended downtime.
These applications require a continuous data protection(CDP) to replicate changes in data immediately from
on-premise to cloud
Cloud provides many options w.r.t your requirements and budget especially for small and medium sized
businesses when compared to a traditional on premise data center. With growing adoption of cloud, we would
see more customization in data storage and tight recovery time SLAs.
References:
http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/Disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud-explained

Philip Booth says:

May 30, 2014 at 10:21 pm

I find this post interesting to note about business uptime which depends on the key considerations like
acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for their systems based on the
financial impact that they may suffer due to system unavailability. I also find interesting about the cloud based
data recovery service.There are many aspects that leads us to a selection of data recovery mechanism and with
the advent of cloud based storage system,more organisations are moving towards it.

Cloud Data Back up And Recovery Plan Checklist

Friday, May 9th, 2014 at 7:54 pm - Posted by Rahul Songadkar

Data, whether its yours or your clients, small or large, on premise or in cloud, is pivotal to business growth. We
are all familiar with the advantages cloud based solutions bring to an organization in terms of flexibility, scalability
and agility. However due to security concerns businesses are in a dilemma over data backup and recovery in
cloud, as their confidential data will be handled by the cloud provider and they dont have full control over it. This
is one major roadblock, we can say which restricts application migration and data backup in cloud.
Let us consider that you have developed an application dealing with numerous financial transactions on a regular
basis (be it banking or ecommerce app with web and mobile access) by following all best practices and the
application is performing well with good number of concurrent users, handling security threats like cross site
scripting, DoS attacks etc. And you deploy the application on worlds leading cloud datacenter provider, say AWS,
Azure, Rackspace etc. who provides the best security for your data with the best antivirus, appropriate firewall
settings, providing communication over a secured channel, encrypted drives and what not. Your application is
generating millions of critical transaction records which enables you to function and provide service to your
customers and also gain interesting insights about them.
Now consider a situation when the datacenter location is compromised be it due to a natural calamity, a severe
power outage, hardware failure or data security breach. Also apart from these calamatic situations, there are
many more instances when you can lose access to your data either temporarily or forever. Following are some of
the data loss situations across IAAS, SAAS, PAAS and Cloud Storage in cloud

Overwriting of logical volume

Data files getting overwritten

Files getting deleted accidentally

Logical volume or partition getting deleted

Data volume accidentally reformatted

Corruption in Snapshot management

Database getting dropped

Tables getting dropped

Row data getting deleted

Corruption in system table

Database file getting corrupted

What will be your
reaction if there is no backup and recovery plan in place?
Think how long your business can survive without being able to access your precious data? Your digital empire,
which you had built with hardwork over the years will crumble in very less time.
One cannot stress enough on the importance of data recovery for your business, with the right data recovery
policy in place you can ensure a steady stream of revenue, enhanced customer satisfaction, ensuring legal and
regulatory compliance and overall maintain your brand reputation.
Before Planning Cloud Data Recovery, following are some points to ponder over which will help you in avoiding
some above mentioned situations

Discuss and design a recovery policy with the cloud provider

Any legal or regulatory compliance required to be met for your application and whether the cloud service
provider(CSP) is able to meet these, for example HIPPA in case of healthcare applications

Data encryption requirement

Determine total cost of ownership (TCO) of data

Know where your data is going

Insist on an acceptable recovery window

Seek out other client opinions and reviews

Ask what will happen to your data if you go dark

Ask if they provide secured multi location distributed file systems with data redundancy

Do they have redundant power connections and providers

Does the cloud service provider has HDD or Tape backup

Has your data been securely transferred and stored in the cloud?

Various Authentication options available for users- two factor model present?

The cloud providers reliability in terms of its availability and ability to serve your users in the event of a
disaster
In the next blog post in this series, we will discuss about Cloud Vs Traditional On Premise Data Recovery and the
various cloud data recovery options.
References:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/magazineContent/Blueprint-for-cloud-based-disaster-recovery

How SQL Server Audit Feature Helps in Data Security Management

Friday, June 6th, 2014 at 11:44 pm - Posted by Vivek Karode

Data Security has rightly been among the top 5 priorities for CIOs for many straight years.
And nowadays with rise in building of applications having large user bases across the globe has resulted in
dynamic data usage patterns. Access routes have been increased to accommodate these patterns, and will
continue to do so. In this scenario making sure whether you business data is secure is pivotal to your growth.
With rise in cloud based and 3rd party storage solutions, adhering to data security standards and compliance
requirements around the globe, makes this problem statement further challenging.
One of the very important aspects of data security management is to ensure appropriate security controls are
applied at the core database level. The level of security required can be governed by the level of sensitive data
handled by the application. For example, an application dealing with Customers personal data and or financial
data would require more stringent security controls as compared to an application that deals with non-financial
data.
The applications need to be strong enough to hold fast to various data security related constraints by having all
the layers of application architecture secure enough. To bring robustness in your architecture for data security, it
is very important to have regular audit features at the database level for various events e.g. access patterns,
potential security breaches, malicious or unauthorized attempt to access data, potential weaknesses in
applications that may lead to breach in data security.
Audit Features in SQL Server helps in addressing these concerns and in making the data security policy robust.
SQL Server Audit offers various advantages and features in term of Security

With SQL Server one can conduct audit in two ways, one is, Instance level and other one is, database
level. For some cases we can define audit process at both levels.

SQL Server audit is fast and lightweight as compared to SQL Server profiler trace file. Because SQL
Server engine automatically manage the Audit event features and we can schedule a job for audit.

The setup of SQL Server audit can be very easy and manageable. By using T-SQL or Management
Studio we can easily configure the SQL Server audit feature.

Capture daily activities: In daily routine we are performing many activities on database level i.e. DML
and DDL operations. We can capture all these activities in audit log. If management wants to monitor DBAs
activities it can perform the audit job on both levels. We can capture and record individual user and object level
audit logs.

Viewing audit logs: we can view audit log on SQL Server itself or if required store physical hard copy of
the logs, on disk and import them from the disk to SQL server for analyzing the audit logs as and when
required.
Limitations of SQL Server Audit
Every coin has two sides, with benefits comes limitations. Here are the aspects which we can consider as SQL
server audit limitations:

As mentioned earlier, when SQL Server runs an audit job, most of the resources are used behind the
scene, hence audit jobs only run when required from security point of view and not on regular basis.

Its difficult to manage multiple instance audits from one centralized location. If required we need to write
some scripts for that.

Audit logs track each event at user level and object level. If we want to filter some events, this task has
to be performed manually.

We can view audit logs in audit viewer only. There is no inbuilt, up to mark report available. If required
we have to use SQL Server Reporting Services for that.
In a nutshell, Audit is a tool that allows Database administrators to capture all the events which were performed
on Database Server. My recommendation is, if you dont want to purchase any third party utility for Security of
your database, you can easily accomplish the same with Audit Feature.