Why Cloud Architects Need to Care About Cloud-Native Backup and Disaster Recovery

It doesn’t take a team of hackers or a clandestine operation to figure out that Cloud Architects want their backup and disaster recovery to be more flexible and scalable, better able to navigate the peaks and valleys of a growing digital business. Developers and Infrastructure & Operations leaders want cloud-native tools to perform faster and more efficiently. Google Cloud has made incredible advancements in security, scalability, and reliability with their Infrastructure-as-a-Service product suite. And, yet, it’s clear that Google Cloud alone cannot futureproof your digital business for enterprise backup and disaster recovery.Truly cloud-native backup and disaster recovery is a ubiquitous linchpin to enable digital businesses. Yet traditional backup vendors have failed to build a native backup software application for Google Cloud. Instead, traditional backup companies ask their customers to over-invest upfront in additional cloud storage infrastructure to fund a ‘backup virtual appliance.’ Skilled security and backup/DR talent are required to assess and run those software applications. In today’s fast-moving IT environment, this expertise is hard to find and expensive when you find it. On top of that, operational costs, headaches, and delays are incurred when upgrading and maintaining these behemoth ‘backup virtual appliances.’Some vendors even charge customers for a Proof of Concept (POC.) Imagine paying an ISV to evaluate their product – that’s absurd. And on top of that, if you’re outsourcing the evaluation, you may need to invest there too.How then can you protect your Google Cloud workloads, data, databases and applications to support the digital business of today — and tomorrow? Cloud-native backup and DR software-as-a-service offers a way forward.Similar to cloud-native application development, cloud-native backup software runs via an API-level integration with the cloud platform. All backup and retention policies – the inside operations of the backup service — are purpose-built for the cloud platform. Whereas traditional backup vendors have built their software from the ground up for the data center, HYCU was purpose-built for Google Cloud Platform and designed to take advantage of GCP’s world-class scalability, security, and reliability. Google Cloud Platform is multitenant by design, operating in a theoretically endless server farm capable of breakthrough performance previously only possible with expensive custom hardware. Native, backup as a service eliminates the proprietary appliances, changes the technical, operational, and fiscal characteristics of an enterprise backup and disaster recovery strategy.

5 Characteristics of Cloud-Native Backup and Disaster Recovery

To better understand their impact, consider the five characteristics a native, public cloud backup provider must meet to be considered cloud-native: multitenancy, scalable, velocity, productivity, and pervasiveness.

Multitenancy

With cloud-native backup as a service, customers leverage the power of the modern Infrastructure as a service they have invested in with Google Cloud. Google is responsible for maintaining and scaling the underlying infrastructure. Like cloud compute and storage, cloud-native backup services have no idle, costly virtual appliances; multitenancy allows ISV’s like HYCU to maximize the underlying flexibility, scalability and security of the Google Cloud Platform.

Scalable

As a cloud service with API level integration requiring no scripts and no agents, cloud-native backup as a service carries no practical scaling limitation. HYCU backup services has IAM permission integration with Google Cloud Platform. This means the permissioning structure automatically recognizes new workloads and applications requiring data protection and scales up the data protection policies to protect new VMs and Applications within the customer’s cloud environment. HYCU’s software integration with Google means that customers instantly take advantage of additional compute, storage, and memory resources – increasing and decreasing with the requirements of the customer’s business. Since HYCU leverages Google Snapshots as our first tier of data protection, it’s a pin-prick on the production load, and as a result has zero impact on production VM and application functionality.

Velocity

By designing and building software from the ground up both on the process level and on the coding level directly in line with the Google Cloud Platform, cloud-native backup providers like HYCU innovate at such a rapid pace, and are able to create new features and capabilities and support enterprise applications like SAP HANA and Cloud SQL much faster than traditional cloud washed virtual appliance competitors. With full integration into the GCP Marketplace, customers across every global region benefit from the most current SAAS product features of HYCU. Support requests are resolved quickly because cloud native support and platform development resources are joined at the hip. Since the core functionality is embedded in the software, cloud-native backup can expand to offices in Europe, Asia, and Africa in hours and days not months.

Productivity

Cloud-native backup and disaster recovery promotes productivity improvements that lead to higher performance backup and DR service levels at lower costs. If you’re invested in Google Cloud Platform then leveraging a cloud-native backup software that scales in lockstep with your infrastructure growth helps drive productivity and cost improvements. Standard, ‘born in the data center’ backup software TCO models just don’t add up. They require large up-front annual license fees and storage costs. It’s a bad idea to spend money on an up-front storage appliance before you even backup your data. All this cost just to build a kludgy virtual appliance that requires agents and scripts will drive up management, implementation, and support costs. To top it off, the virtual appliance has a glass Terabyte ceiling. If you want to go over that Terabyte limit, you have to buy another virtual appliance…ugh. Leveraging a smart, nimble backup software that integrates with the underlying platform itself enables the optimum cloud-native backup/DR strategy. The upshot: infinite scale with a fully managed backup/DR service, to make your architects and engineers a lot more productive.

Pervasiveness

Like today’s digital business, enterprise backup and disaster recovery must be available everywhere, accessible across multiple regions on a truly global basis is a requirement of any backup strategy. Access to your cloud-native backup should also be available from an on-prem infrastructure to DR to your public cloud provider as a storage target.

A Radical, not progressive, shift in Cloud Backup & DR

In sharing all five characteristics, cloud-native backup software helps companies avoid the cost overhead and stagnant process of traditional backup and DR software who’ve ported their cloud-washed solutions up to the cloud and falsely claim that their ‘native.’ This sets a high bar, and the business benefits cannot be gained by merely porting software or hosting a backup appliance in the cloud. Cloud Native backup and DR software must be built with the DNA of Google Cloud Platform from the ground up. With these boxes ticked, cloud-native backups like HYCU are a way to help transform backup architecture and design in a meaningful way.