As investments in hybrid and multi cloud services skyrocket across all businesses, Theresa Miller, Principal Technologist at data management provider Cohesity shares some vital perspectives on putting an effective ‘data recovery and restoration’ plan in place, in the event of a cloud outage.
With so many businesses dependent on the cloud giants, what happens if there is an outage?
In the early 2000s, businesses were slowly adopting cloud applications such as Ariba, Google Apps, NetSuite, Salesforce and Taleo. Then, in the 2010s, we began to see clouds proliferate as innovative companies took a ‘cloud-first’ stance and introduced platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to their tech stack for piloting, testing, and running services.
Today, we are confident that businesses will harness cloud investments, formalize multi-cloud and hybrid cloudOpens a new window strategies, and reel in control via consoles that increase visibility and manageability over disparate locations.
While the more progressive companies are starting to ask ‘why not cloud?’ instead of ‘why cloud?’, we’re still seeing companies struggle to manage areas where cloud has yet to take hold. Because it’s the default deployment mode for new applications, some companies find themselves asking if that dependence on a deployment model incurs a risk. The short answer – yes. Any innovations to IT dependencies traditionally incur more risk. Remember the IT mainframe? They typically add more silos and IT becomes even more distributed. To make things even harder, we are simultaneously seeing a rapidly evolving cyber threatOpens a new window landscape that produces attacks that undermine security across all types of infrastructure.
Learn More: Cloud Isn’t Always the Answer: Issues to Consider Before MigratingOpens a new window
Cloud Never Fails, Right?
As cloud computing grows, we enter an era where tactical investments become strategic. We will see a return to order with more CIOOpens a new window s attempting to reign in technology and implement controls that reduce silos, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. As we increasingly depend on cloud services, we may not realize where our data resides or travels. We revel in the notion that our data is somehow safe because it’s watched over by the internet and cloud giants we’ve placed our trust in. However, there is one question that must be asked: what happens when there is an outage?
No service is immune from an outage, caused by an attack or malfunction — and that includes cloud services. In 2019, Office 365 Exchange Online experienced an outage, shortly followed by other Microsoft services. AWS, then we experienced outages for Azure, Google Gmail, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Salesforce, and various consumer platforms such as Apple Cloud, Facebook, and Instagram. If these top tech companies and services can experience an outage, anything can. We must have a plan in place to rapidly restore in the face of the worst-case scenario.
Learn More: 5 Keys to a Successful Multi-Cloud Management StrategyOpens a new window
Who Takes Responsibility?
According to a recent McAfee reportOpens a new window , 69 percent of CISOs trust cloud providers to keep their company’s data secure. Additionally, 12 percent of CISOs believe cloud service providers are solely responsible for securing data. But the truth is that cloud security is a shared responsibility. Cloud Opens a new window provider giants have created a cloud shared responsibility model (SRM) to educate customers on what’s required of them.
SRMs state that customers are responsible for providing security of their data in the cloud — just as they are responsible when data resides on-premises. It doesn’t change for different cloud deployment types either. Customers are held responsible for securing their data and identities, on-premises systems, and the various cloud components assigned to them (which varies by service type).
According to another recent study, it is believed that by 2022 at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be a result of customer error — in other words customers not upholding their end of the SRM. In the case of a major cloud-based service outage, customers really need to understand how much of the responsibility and heavy lifting for recovery would fall on them.
Learn More: Cloud Computing Can Help Us Survive this CrisisOpens a new window
How to Get Everything in Order?
When a cloud service provider has an outage, it is important to have a recovery backstop to maintain business continuity and data and regulatory governanceOpens a new window . However, backing up applications and data across cloud and on-premise environments can quickly produce a complex web of solutions that are unwieldy in a time of crisis. The best way to ensure quick recovery is to back up all apps, data, and workloads — wherever they reside — on a single platform. To make this work, deduplication, indexing, and search are essential or else there is a high chance of “bill shock†as various low-cost cloud services add up quickly to large sums when data copies pile up across an opaque and fragmented system.
A research paperOpens a new window from the Enterprise Strategy Group found that “today, it takes on average five separate vendors to provide data management across on-premises and multiple cloud environments.†That needs to change. As we move from a world where cloud Opens a new window is adopted in an ad hoc way to one where the cloud Opens a new window is IT, we need to rethink its surrounding support infrastructure and the responsibility model associated with it. With cloud services arriving and maturing, the conversation about securing data and infrastructure is shifting. The success of an IT strategy is dictated by how a customer manages and protects data spanning from data center to edge to cloud.
When the inevitable cloud outage occurs, an enterprise’s IT will still be responsible for maintaining services to users. Stop simply asking, “What should we do if our cloud provider experiences an outage?†And start planning ahead. That’s because it’s not just the cloud provider’s success on the line if a major cloud outage occurs — it’s now your company’s wellbeing too.
Let us know if you liked this article on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!