Backup and recovery conversations often get derailed.

While everyone understands RTO and RPO, it is hard to apply these metrics in a granular fashion.

To that end, it is better to think of Backup and Recovery - as MULTIPLE backups and recovery PROCESSES (around the business process).

  • Identity Migration - User Identities and ADFS Connections for SSO purposes to AAD. Different Apps go to different AAD Tenants. External Facing go to AAD B2C and Internal Facing to AAD Main.
  • Application-level recovery (for example, a specific web server application version). This is most often process referred to when customers speak of RTO, RPO
    Cloud Managed service recovery (e.g. a Cloud SQL Table or an RDS table)
  • Persistent Disk Recovery - i.e. Volume-level  (for example, an EBS volume in AWS or a Persistent Disk in GCP)
    VM Level - i.e. instance-level recovery. (for example, an EC2 instance or a Compute Instance on GCP)
  • Each of these has it's own set of RTOs and RPOs available.

Some Questions to Ask Customers

  1. Are we using the cloud mainly for archiving ? If so, what is the total size?
  2. What are the sizes of full backups vs daily backups?
  3. How Virtualized is your environment? - VMWare , KVM, Redhat, HyperVM? How much is Bare Metal ? - 25%
  4. Is the intent to move all VMs to the cloud and do backups from within the cloud to the cloud? Or are part of the VMs to be left behind in the datacenter?
  5. What are the Business Drivers? What are the primary drivers? Is there an initiative from higher ups?

Need an experienced AWS/GCP/Azure Professional to help out with your Cloud Backup Strategy? Set up a time with Anuj Varma.