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Leveraging cloud with '3-2-1' backup

Organisations must have three separately-stored copies of their data, suggests Veeam.

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 17 Sept 2014

If organisations are to safeguard their data in the cloud, they need to embrace the '3-2-1' backup rule of data management.

So said Warren Olivier, regional manager for southern Africa at Veeam Software, addressing attendees at the ITWeb Cloud Computing 2014 Summit in Bryanston, yesterday.

Describing the 3-2-1 rule, Olivier said organisations must have at least three copies of their data, store two copies on two different media; and keep one backup copy offsite.

By three copies, the rule stipulates, in addition to an enterprise's primary data, it should have at least two more backups.

The 3-2-1 rule also suggests organisations keep copies of their data on at least two different storage types, such as internal hard disk drives and removable storage media (tapes, external hard drives, USB drives, SD-cards, CDs, DVDs or even floppy disks), or on two internal hard disk drives in different storage locations.

Adhering to this rule is critical to today's "always on" enterprise, which cannot afford to be affected by downtime, said Olivier. He pointed out that most businesses today are "always on" but the systems needed to support 24/7/365 availability are not always up to scratch.

According to Olivier, most existing backup solutions are also failing to give businesses the data protection they need.

He gave the example of hosting service Code Spaces, which went down in June this year following a distributed denial of service attack. After the incident, Code Spaces indicated that: "in summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted", said Olivier.

The 3-2-1 rule comes in handy when organisations are dealing with compliance issues, especially with the introduction of the Protection of Personal Information Act, he added.

He pointed out that with the new legislation, organisations that do not comply will suffer reputational damage which can have adverse effects on their businesses.

Regularly testing backup solutions is also critical, Olivier noted. "Don't always assume it works," he said. "By so doing, you can leverage all the benefits associated with a cloud strategy to realise the full promise of cloud computing."

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