Authority_October_2020

October 2020 - The Authority 39 SOMETIMES THE BEST DEFENSE IS A STRONG OFFENSE. Instead of guarding the front door, look for a solution that provides point in time recovery, which can give your organi- zation the power to cost-effectively go on the offense to protect against ran- somware and other forms of cyber-at- tacks. From database corruptions, accidental system changes, ransom- ware, or other malicious attacks, point in time recovery gives customers the ability to recover data and IT envi- ronments to previous points in time, enabling failover to earlier versions of replicated servers. In minutes, a cus- tomer can restore or recover a set of data or a particular setting from a time in the past, that is, before the attack occurred. More recently, these ser- vices have become much more cost-ef- fective to implement and maintain. In the event of a disaster, such as ran- somware, drive failure or virus, a cus- tomer’s computers become compro- mised and will not work. With a point in time recovery solution, customers can access thousands upon thousands of archived snapshots of their system. Once an uncorrupted snapshot is iden- tified, the customer’s system, includ- ing data and IT environment, is “spun up” in minutes so that normal business may continue. During this failover period, the customer is only using their on-premise computer and the internet to access the backup of their system. After the disaster is over, the process can be reversed to automatically sync the customer’s on-premise computer, a process known as failback. Continuous Data Replication A critical differentiator with today’s backup solutions is Continuous Data Replication. This proprietary technology provides real-time, asynchronous, block-level replica- tion done at the operating system level. Once installed and activated, an initial replication begins, reading all of the data on the machines at the block level and replicating it to a low- cost “staging area” that is automati- cally provisioned. The initial replica- tion can take anywhere from several minutes to several days, depending on the amount of data to be replicated and the bandwidth available between the source infrastructure and the replica- tion servers. Running a quick upload speed test prior to the initial replica- tion can help estimate how long the replication process will take. In some cases, customers may have to upgrade their internet connection so that repli- cation times are kept reasonable. After the initial replication is com- plete, the source machines are contin- uously monitored to ensure constant synchronization, up to the last second. Any changes to source machines are asynchronously replicated in real-time into the staging area. Continuous Data Replication allows customers to achieve sub-second recovery point objectives, as the data is always up-to- date and ready to be spun up as soon as disaster strikes. The data replica- tion engine is application agnostic, supporting all application types, in- cluding databases and legacy applica- tions, any source infrastructure, and a wide array of operating systems. Low-Cost “Staging Areas” Ongoing replication of source ma- chines occurs in low-cost “staging areas,” which contain cost-effective resources automatically provisioned and managed to receive the replicat- ed data without incurring significant costs. Whereas traditional disaster recovery solutions require duplicate hardware, compute, storage, network- ing, and software licenses in order to ensure data integrity, the staging areas eliminates the need for duplicate provisioning of resources and thus significantly reduces the total cost of ownership for disaster recovery. The fully provisioned recovery environ- ment is only launched during a disas- ter or during a DR drill. Fully operational workloads are automatically launched at the time of disaster recovery or test drills. This automated process includes cloning disks from the staging area to target networks and provisioning all addi- tional resources such as virtual ma- chines, network interfaces or firewalls. The process typically takes minutes to complete at which time the custom- er would only use their on-premises computer and the internet to access the offsite back up of their servers, appli- cation and data. Point-in-Time Recovery In many disaster recovery use cases, the goal is to spin up the most up-to- date state of the source machine and continue operations as before. How- ever, in cases of database corruption, accidental system changes, ransom-