E-guide

The vulnerability of
backup in a
predominantly remote
+ cloud world
 E-guide

In this e-guide
How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
In this e-guide:
Backup is fundamental to IT, but things have changed a lot recently. The
pandemic has had a key impact in this. Firstly, the explosion of remote
working placed a spotlight on just how compliant our backups are, and
whether we could successfully protect a myriad remote endpoints. With
the rise in cloud working it also threw our ability to protect cloud data
into sharp focus, and raised the importance of cloud-to-cloud backup.
The pandemic also coincided with a rise in the prevalence of
ransomware attacks, which has come to rely on data protection –
snapshots and backup – as a key method of recovering from an intrusion.

In this e-guide we look at the effects of the pandemic on backup,

Getting more PRO+ essential
content
including the increased prevalence of remote working and use of the
cloud. Then we also look at where backups can go wrong, because it’s
one thing to set backups jobs running but the crucial part is to know you
can rely on being able to recover from them. We also focus in on the key

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differences between backups and snapshots, why they are not the same
In this e-guide
and how a good data protection strategy incorporates both methods.
How the pandemic changed
Finally, we look at how snapshots have emerged as a core approach to
backup potentially recovering from a ransomware attack.

Storage 101: Snapshots vs

backup

Immutable snapshots aim to

neutralise ransomware

Backup failure: Four key areas

where backups go wrong

Getting more PRO+ essential

content

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 E-guide

In this e-guide How the pandemic changed backup

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Stephen Pritchard
Remote working is now a permanent arrangement for a growing number of businesses
after the Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations of all sizes to move to home
working on a wide scale in a very short timeframe.
The impact on all areas of IT has been huge, but arguably it is most acute in backup and
data protection.
And the shift to remote working is no longer viewed as a temporary measure for
dealing with public health restrictions. Management consulting firm McKinsey believes
more than 20% of the workforce can operate as effectively from home as they would
in the office. If employers allow it, it says four times as many people could work from
home than in 2019.
The impact of home working on IT systems is well documented. Businesses have had to
invest in laptops and tablets, and even printers, for remote staff. They have also had to
re-engineer networks and applications to allow remote access on a large scale.

Meanwhile, the move to remote working has forced organisations to revisit their data
protection and backup strategies.

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In this e-guide Protected by being remote?

How the pandemic changed From a business continuity perspective, an organisation with a highly distributed
backup workforce can be more resilient than one where the majority of employees are office-
based. The obvious difference is that there is no need to invoke physical disaster
Storage 101: Snapshots vs recovery (DR) planning, such as moving to emergency office space. As long as
backup datacentre or cloud-based applications remain accessible, work carries on.

Immutable snapshots aim to

neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
But taking work off-premise forces changes to backup and recovery. Are backup
systems configured to run on remote devices? And do employees have enough
bandwidth to run backup tools?
At the start of the pandemic, organisations found the bandwidth of their virtual private
network (VPN) under stress, so they had to invest in improving capacity. Anecdotally,
supporting technologies such as backup was viewed as less critical than line-of-
business applications.
“For remote workers, all of a sudden their home became their office. They may not
even have had a desk for their laptop. These effects created a domino effect of
networking, security and data protection consequences,” says Christophe Bertrand, a
senior analyst at ESG.

But although some organisations opted for local solutions for their backup needs –
including USB sticks, hard drives or even employee-purchased online storage –

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Bertrand believes that Covid-19 has accelerated existing trends towards cloud backup
In this e-guide and reliance on online office suites and software as a service (SaaS).

How the pandemic changed Applications such as Microsoft Office 365 became much more important during the
backup pandemic,” says Bertrand.

Storage 101: Snapshots vs Five areas where the pandemic impacted backup
backup

1. Local backups, and data compliance

Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Asking users to back up data locally to removable media is rarely an IT team’s first
choice, but during the pandemic, especially the first few weeks, it might have been the
only option.
Not all network-based endpoint backup tools supported remote users, and those that
did had to contend with limited bandwidth and rising demand for VPN access from
other applications.

Supplier support for remote users has improved over the past year, so IT leaders
should check the features offered in their backup software. They should also check
licensing, to ensure their endpoints are covered.

Once employees have moved to a secure, remote backup system, they should securely
erase local backups to prevent a backup solution becoming a data compliance
problem.

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2. Protecting SaaS applications

In this e-guide
Software-as-a-service is one of the technologies that really helped organisations adapt
How the pandemic changed to pandemic working. And backups for SaaS applications are becoming more important
backup – Gartner says it accounts for a growing number of client enquiries.

Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
“In the past two years, infrastructure and operations leaders have begun to include
SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)
and Salesforce as a part of their backup strategy,” says Gartner senior research director
Santhosh Rao.
Although users might assume “cloud” applications automatically back up their data,
this is not the case. But suppliers are developing specific backup tools for SaaS, with
Office 365 the best supported.
Google Workspace and Salesforce backups are still “largely a work in progress,” notes
Rao, but the pandemic has prompted suppliers to invest there too.
3. Backing up to the cloud – and cloud-to-cloud backup

Backing up user data to the cloud bypasses the limitations of corporate VPNs and
avoids the data protection pitfalls of remote workers’ local backups.

According to StorageCraft, part of Arcserve, 61% of UK IT decision-makers have

increased their use of cloud backup services since the start of the pandemic. Another
28% say they rely increasingly on cloud services for data recovery.

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The pandemic has undoubtedly forced CIOs’ hands in the face of technical and
In this e-guide compliance concerns. Backing up users’ devices directly to the cloud should be more
reliable, easier for employees and, with the right controls, compliant with data
How the pandemic changed protection regulations. The option to back up to private cloud instances provides
backup
further assurance.

Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
But organisations are also looking at cloud-to-cloud backup. More on-premise
suppliers now support backups for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a
service (PaaS), including cloud-native workloads and virtual machines, according to
Gartner.
With the pandemic shifting more critical applications from the datacentre to the cloud,
ensuring they are fully backed up is vital. As Gartner’s Rao points out, this should also
include containerised workloads.

Backing up to the cloud also helps deal with another pandemic impact – IT staff no
Getting more PRO+ essential longer need to physically access the datacentre to manage storage.
content
4. Centralised backup management

The pandemic, and the move to a more fluid and hybrid IT model, has increased
workloads for IT teams. As a result, they need centralised tools that can protect data,
regardless of location.

This includes backing up user data directly to the public cloud and tiering data to the
cloud.

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According to Gartner’s Rao, most backup providers now support this. Using services
In this e-guide such as Amazon S3 and Azure Blob storage, as well as their long-term storage
equivalents Glacier and Azure Archive Blob, can help businesses reduce storage costs.
How the pandemic changed
backup 5. Ransomware

Ransomware attacks have been another unfortunate feature of the pandemic that has
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
affected enterprise backup strategies.

According to one research report, from IT security company Bitdefender, ransomware

Immutable snapshots aim to increased by 485% in 2020. Covid-related phishing campaigns, and attacks on the
neutralise ransomware
pharmaceutical and health sectors, account for a large part of the rise.

Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
But any organisation can be targeted by ransomware. As a result, CIOs and CISOs are
looking again at “immutable” storage, including tape and Worm-type devices.
Meanwhile, backup providers are developing ransomware detection, immutable
snapshots – potentially in the cloud – and “clean copy” recovery techniques to allow
organisations to recover their data safely.

Security experts warn that ransomware will continue to be a threat, even when the
pandemic is under control.

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In this e-guide Storage 101: Snapshots vs backup

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Antony Adshead, Storage Editor
Recently we looked at backup for NAS – but backup isn’t the only form of data
protection for NAS. There are also storage-centric forms of protection, such as
snapshots and replication, which offer more rapid recovery than traditional backup.
In this article, we will look at snapshots and to what extent they can be a replacement
or an addition to backup. We will also briefly look at replication and see how that fits
with snapshots and backup.

Backup failure: Four key areas

Snapshots 101
where backups go wrong

Fundamentally, a snapshot is a record – comprised of metadata – that indicates the

Getting more PRO+ essential state of blocks and files in a unit of storage. Often, snapshots come as a feature of NAS
content or SAN storage and are created and held on that storage.

They allow the user to roll back to previously existing versions of a volume, drive, file
system, database, etc. So, for example, you can roll back to the state of a unit of
storage at any previous snapshot.

Snapshots are like a point-in-time copy or table of contents that shows which blocks
and/or files existed and where. In the case of rolling back, the volume or unit of

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storage in question would be changed to a state that reflected the snapshot, by

In this e-guide removal and movement of blocks, etc.

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Where blocks have been deleted, these have to be retained, and are added to the
snapshot in case they are needed. In such a case, the version rolled back to could be a
mixture of metadata from previous snapshots, data retained by those snapshots and
whatever counts as a parent copy (ie, before snapshots).
So, snapshots are not backups because they are not copies. They don’t take up much
space individually, but their total volume can grow, especially if there are lots of
deleted blocks/files, and so suppliers usually limit the amount of snapshots that can be
retained.

Backup failure: Four key areas

where backups go wrong
Snapshots: Benefits and pitfalls

Getting more PRO+ essential A key benefit of snapshots is that they allow a faster roll-back to a previous point-in-
content time than from backups.

Another plus is that snapshots allow much more frequent protection than backup. It is
possible to set snapshots for, say, once an hour, without affecting production systems,
whereas backups are likely to run once a day and outside main production hours
because of their impact on resources.

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In this e-guide
How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
The flipside to being rapidly available comes down to snapshots usually being held
locally on the storage device. That means they are vulnerable to any outages that
affect that system and they use up (potentially primary) storage capacity.
So, snapshots are best used in conjunction with a backup strategy. Snapshots are good
for more frequent protection measured in minutes or hours, while backups are used
for daily protection. Snapshot retention periods will usually reflect that, with deletion
of snapshots occurring after, say, 48 hours, which allows for one or two backups to
have taken place in that period.
Snapshot types
There are two fundamental types of snapshot mechanism: copy-on-write and redirect-
on-write.

Getting more PRO+ essential Copy-on-write

content
In copy-on-write, when an I/O request seeks to change a storage block, that block is
copied first and retained by the snapshot to which it belongs. That keeps everything
consistent for that snapshot, which comprises pointers to unchanged blocks and copies
of those subsequently changed.

Copy-on-write snapshots save on space because unchanged data is referenced from

the original copy (as long as not much has changed). The downside is that performance

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can be affected because every write request is accompanied by the need to copy out a
In this e-guide block for retention by the snapshot.

How the pandemic changed Redirect-on-write

backup
With redirect-on-write, when new blocks are created, it only requires one write and
that is to the snapshot. That means any reference to the current state of data is to the
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
original and the snapshot. When snapshots are deleted, all those differences need to
be reconciled back to the parent.

Immutable snapshots aim to Because new data only exists across potentially multiple snapshots, access to it can
neutralise ransomware
become complex and performance can suffer, but less storage volume is required.

Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
There are a few other common snapshot types:
Continuous data protection
Continuous data protection (CDP) is the creation of snapshots as above, but every time
a change is made to the unit of storage in question – or at least at a level that is
relevant to human users, such as file creation, update or deletion. That means CDP
allows for roll-back to any point in time, but it also means a performance hit for more
of the time. Where normally snapshots would run at intervals of once an hour, for
example, with some performance overhead at those times, CDP creates extra I/O every
time something occurs.

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Mirroring, clones and replication

In this e-guide
Related to snapshots, but entirely different in terms of mechanism, are the various
How the pandemic changed forms of cloning. At its simplest, a clone is exactly as it sounds: an identical copy of a
backup unit of storage. Not an original and snapshots of updated areas, but the whole thing.

This could take the form of one-off cloning of a drive or regular cloning of a volume,
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
drive, etc, by the snapshot utility. Or it could be synchronous or asynchronous
mirroring, in which data is written to two physical locations (almost) simultaneously.
Here we are talking about replication, which is at the higher end of things in terms of
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
technical and cost considerations.

Replication is a highly effective form of data protection and is used in the most
Backup failure: Four key areas transaction-sensitive verticals for its ability to provide an instantly available failover
where backups go wrong
copy.

Getting more PRO+ essential But replication can’t replace backups. They have to work together. For example,
content because replication is near-real time in the way it makes its copy, if corrupted or
infected files are replicated, then you need a version to roll back to. Of course, that
could be a snapshot, as discussed above, but then they also need underpinning by
backups because of their limited lifespan. Also, because replication can be costly, it
may be that only certain datasets are replicated, while everything is backed up.

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In this e-guide Immutable snapshots aim to neutralise ransomware

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Antony Adshead, Storage Editor
Ransomware has been 2021’s growth industry. The volume of attacks is in the tens of
thousands, with thousands of victims and an average payout of $1.85m, according to
Sophos.
We could dwell on the data – which sectors are most at risk and in which countries –
but the key focus is the main way in which storage and backup suppliers are tackling
the issue, namely via snapshots, which they are usually keen to call “immutable
snapshots”.
But why immutable snapshots? Where do they fit as a response to the mechanism of a
ransomware attack? Which suppliers provide this capability? And what are the benefits
and potential drawbacks?
Ransomware attack phases and why snapshots fit

There are several key phases to a ransomware attack, namely the initial intrusion, a
period of reconnaissance inside the victim’s systems, then the execution of encryption
and exfiltration of data. Then come the ransom demands.

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 E-guide

In this e-guide
How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Snapshots provide customers the ability to roll back to uncorrupted copies of their
data made before the execution of code introduced by the attacker. In theory, from
here they can ignore ransom demands, purge their systems of the effects of intrusion
and continue business as normal.
Snapshots are not backups, in that they are not just copies of data. They are a record of
the state of and location of files and blocks that make up files at a specific time to
which a customer can roll back. That record may comprise more than just a record of
state, with metadata, deleted data, parent copies, and so on, all needing to be
retained.
All snapshots are immutable: So what’s new?
Snapshots are immutable anyway, in that they are write-once read-many (Worm).
What storage and backup suppliers have added are features such as encryption,
mechanisms that lock snapshots from being moved or mounted externally, with
multifactor authentication (MFA) required to manage them.

With no one – not even administrators, but certainly not ransomware software –
having the ability to access snapshots or move or delete them, customers should
always have access to clean copies of their data following a breach.

That’s the key benefit, with the added benefit over backups that snapshots are usually
taken much more frequently than once a day.

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In this e-guide Snapshots as a restore source: Pros and cons

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
But there are also potential drawbacks. Historically, snapshots have not been retained
for long periods because they take up storage capacity. For this reason, retention
periods for snapshots have often been short – around 48 hours.
With ransomware recovery the use case, the period customers need to retain
immutable snapshots zooms up.
The time spent by attackers inside systems – “dwell time” – averages 11 days
according to Sophos and 24 days according to Mandiant. During this period, they will
be carrying out reconnaissance, moving laterally between different parts of the
network, gathering credentials, identifying sensitive and lucrative data, exfiltrating
data, and so on.

Getting more PRO+ essential That means snapshot retention periods, and therefore the capacity required to store
content them, will creep up. Suppliers know this, and in some cases have targeted storage
subsystems with bulk capacity at these use cases.

Snapshots and RPO

The question also has to be asked, what is the effect on recovery point objective
(RPO)?

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 E-guide

In this e-guide
How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
After all, if attackers have been inside systems for a week or two, data held on
snapshots for that entire period may be compromised because it has been recorded
with corruption intact. It may be possible to remove traces of the intruder, but the last
completely clean copies may represent a recovery point some time in the past.
Anyway, don’t forget, all snapshots are immutable. What’s new is that suppliers are
layering methods of making sure they cannot be exported or deleted so that
customers’ last line of defence – or rather restore – is not compromised. Below is a
selection of what suppliers are doing.
Cohesity SpanFS snapshots are retained in an immutable state and never made
accessible to be mounted by an external system. Ransomware cannot affect the
immutable snapshot. Cohesity allows for an air-gap in which customers can replicate
data to an external cloud (see also its recent Fort Knox plan), another physical location
or tape. Multifactor authentication is used to control access to protected copies.

Getting more PRO+ essential IBM’s Safeguarded Copy is available in its all-flash storage arrays. It automatically
content
creates immutable snapshots that are isolated and cannot be accessed or altered by
unauthorised users. Safeguarded Copy keeps up to 15,000 immutable point-in-time
copies that cannot be written to or read by an application and can’t be mapped to a
host. Safeguarded Copy can be integrated with IBM Security QRadar, which monitors
activities and looks for signs that an attack may be in progress.

Panzura is a little different, being a hybrid cloud or cloud gateway-focused operation,

and its CloudFS takes a slightly different approach. It recognises altered file data and

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In this e-guide
How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
any resulting encrypted files are written to the object store as new data. So, if a file is
encrypted by ransomware, users can recover to the state prior to infection by
reference to the clean existing data with snapshots.
Pure Storage puts immutable snapshots in SafeMode, with Protection Groups that
provide configurable snapshot policies covering frequency of snapshots, retention
policy and ability to send snapshots to other destinations for recovery. Intruders can’t
set retention periods to zero or eradicate snapshots. Retention can be increased, but
can’t be decreased unless two authorised contacts with PINs contact Pure Support.
Rubrik’s snapshots and backups are also built as immutable so they can’t be encrypted
or deleted by a ransomware attack. Impact Analysis is also possible via Rubrik, to
identify what data was encrypted and sensitive data that may have been exposed, with
multifactor authentication access to protected data.

Getting more PRO+ essential

content

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 E-guide

In this e-guide Backup failure: Four key areas where backups go

wrong
How the pandemic changed
backup Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Despite the prevalence of many forms of data protection – that range from local RAID
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
via snapshots and replication to keeping copies in the cloud – the facts of life are that
backup
backup is still fundamental to IT.

Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
That’s because no matter what other methods you use – snapshots, replication, and so
on – any corruption to data is copied with it, so a good library of backups going back as
far as possible is needed to roll back to.
But backups fail – and, according to a recent survey, the failure rate is a staggeringly
high 37%.
Backups fail for a variety of reasons, and in this article we survey the key causes. Some
are unexpected and not particularly avoidable, such as hard drive failure, but which
can be mitigated.

Others can be expected, and can be mitigated, such as issues that arise after patching
or changes to other configurations.

Then there is the human element, such as making sure you set up backups correctly
and knowing how your backup software works.

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In this e-guide Media failures

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Hardware is an awkward fact of life in IT. Awkward because it can fail. For hard drives,
failure can come unexpectedly, although for spinning disk it is known that something
like one in 100 will pack up annually.
So, backups can fail because drives fail, but that can and should be mitigated by
redundancy such as via RAID. Solid-state drives (SSDs) can fail too, though at a lower
rate than hard disc drives (HDDs), although SSDs have more of a limited lifespan. Here,
again, the key is to build in hardware redundancy and refreshes.

Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Tape has its own failure mechanisms, centred on the effects of time and use on
magnetic media itself and its relationship to reading heads.
Manufacturers’ instructions for tape retention and maintenance should be followed,
and peculiarities of the media should be noted – reading heads and media, for
example, can wear together in ways that may not show until you want to recover data
to different equipment.

The big takeaway when it comes to avoiding hardware failures that affect backups is to
build in redundancy, including through something such as 3-2-1 backup.

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In this e-guide Software issues

How the pandemic changed
backup
Storage 101: Snapshots vs
backup
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
Backup failure: Four key areas
where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Issues surrounding software encompass a large gamut of potential issues that can
affect backup. One of the most common sources of backup failure is when changes
brought about by upgrades or patching cause issues the next time a backup runs.
That can be because upgrades or patches – that often comprise very large numbers of
changes to software – can create incompatibilities with the backup configuration. This
can include changes to applications that mean something is now unsupported
somewhere in the stack and security updates that change or reset settings that make it
impossible for backups to connect.
The key method of mitigation is to be aware that updates are set to take place and to
be ready for the type of disruptions to backups – and elsewhere – that can occur. Some
suppliers’ predictive analytics platforms may help by being able to foresee potential
issues with particular configurations of update and software installed.
Sometimes backup software itself can fail. Issues can include services associated with
the application failing to run, agents failing to install correctly, connection problems,
read/write errors and even things such as daylight savings time changes affecting
backup Window settings. Here you need to check the suppliers’ support resources for
solutions.

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Virtualised environments can bring their own particular problems. The creation,
In this e-guide migration and decommissioning of virtual machines (VMs) and their data necessarily
involves many changes and backup software needs to keep track of a potentially very
How the pandemic changed complex landscape.
backup
Failures surrounding backup can be caused by corrupt catalogues, insufficient
Storage 101: Snapshots vs permissions and things such as Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) failures and virtual
backup hard disk (VHD) corruption.

The emergence of widespread use of containers is likely to bring its own further
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
complications due to their rapidly moving lifecycles.

Backup failure: Four key areas

where backups go wrong
Getting more PRO+ essential
content
Human error
It’s a basic fact that humans are responsible for overseeing the deployment and
operation of backup processes, no matter how automated, so there’s always scope for
human error in the process. The key is to reduce the likelihood of it affecting your
backups.

Configuration of backups, knowledge of the backup product(s) in use and the tools
they include that can help automate tasks is the starting point. Getting configuration
right and knowing how to use built-in tools to discover, data sets, applications, services
and other dependencies is key to successful backups – and, perhaps more importantly,
to successful restores.

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After all, backup is nothing without the ability to recover data, whether that’s a single
In this e-guide file or an entire system. It’s more likely in the latter case that you’ll need to be aware
of critical dependencies and to have ensured they are protected and restorable.
How the pandemic changed
backup Here, the supplier may have some useful discovery tools, but be careful that you know
what they may not have discovered in terms of dependency. A core application may
Storage 101: Snapshots vs have dependencies such as access control that will be vital to getting it running again,
backup for example.

A key method to being prepared when it comes to the human element is to carry out
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware
regular testing and to build policies and procedures to cover things that could fall
through the gaps that machines cannot deal with.

Backup failure: Four key areas

where backups go wrong
Infrastructure failures

Getting more PRO+ essential Backups have to traverse all sorts of infrastructure so a failure anywhere can affect
content backup and recovery, with potentially the latter being even more vulnerable.

Infrastructure can encompass tape drives and libraries, disk arrays, backup servers,
networks and increasingly your link to the cloud.

Key to mitigation of infrastructure issues is, once again, redundancy. So, for the parts
of the infrastructure that you manage, make sure to have redundancy built in, whether
at the level of media, servers or connectivity.

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For those you don’t have direct control over – such as wide-area network (WAN)
In this e-guide connections, cloud resources, and so on – clear service-level agreements (SLAs) need
to be in place. And make sure that infrastructure is in place to effect a return to
How the pandemic changed working should disaster strike.
backup
Since the pandemic, the huge increase in the need to support remote working will
Storage 101: Snapshots vs have thrown infrastructure issues into sharp relief. It brought the need to look at the
backup ability of existing software products to handle edge device backup, or even the need to
procure a specialised product for this task.
Immutable snapshots aim to
neutralise ransomware

Backup failure: Four key areas

where backups go wrong

Getting more PRO+ essential

content

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In this e-guide Getting more CW+ exclusive content

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