The case for third-party cloud backup tools

If you are like most cloud teams, you probably think you have your backup covered. After all, you have scripts and APIs in place, so what could go wrong? As companies scale in the cloud, maintaining these scripts and ensuring compliance, and retraining staff to perform these activities becomes challenging. That is where third-party backup tools come in, which address all these issues, provide a higher-level of efficiency, and help create a consistent policy across enterprise data centers, cloud, and the edge.

Here are four key reasons why enterprises should consider a third-party backup solution for their cloud workloads:

Cloud Costs: Using cloud provider backup tools can cost enterprises up to 10x more in operational expenditure when compared to Veritas, the market-leading cloud backup solution[1]

It is now well known that cloud storage and snapshot costs significantly increase backup total cost of ownership (TCO). This is primarily because backup tools offered by cloud providers do not support deduplication, thus increasing storage costs. NetBackup’s containerized and elastic deduplication services reduce the overall cost of backup by 90 percent. Automated policy lifecycle management further reduces cost by moving backup data to low-cost cloud storage tiers. When backing up data from on-premises to the cloud, NetBackup’s deduplication engine on-premises, significantly reduces the data sent over the wire. Another key aspect is to ensure the operational costs of running the backup infrastructure is low. NetBackup’s containerized thin clients and deduplication services can scale up and down based on the backup load, thus significantly reducing operational costs.

Ransomcloud: Enterprises spend $1.4M on average to remediate an attack and greater than one month to recover data

Although the cloud is inherently secure, security is a shared responsibility between the provider and the enterprise customer. Cloud workloads must align to a security baseline to ensure appropriate protection levels are in place. With ‘ransomcloud’ attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, detecting anomalies in the cloud can be challenging, requiring cloud teams to keep complex serverless pipelines up to date. In some cases, it is hard to ascertain the types of anomalies that an enterprise should look out for. Backup tools offered natively by the cloud provider do not address these scenarios. Veritas helps by monitoring for changes in backup schedules, policies, retention periods, backup volume, image size and file count, backup duration, transferred data size, and more. It also supports built-in malware scanning and integrates with third-party malware scanning engines. Cloud applications can also be tested for or recovered from ransomware via an isolated recovery environment in the cloud. Customers can also make use of Recovery Vault, Veritas’ new cloud-based immutable backup repository, to store an air-gapped copy of on-premises or cloud data.

Application-consistent protection: many enterprises fail to apply the right protection policies for cloud-apps

Backup tools provided by the hyperscalers usually protect key Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services offered by the platform and few on-premises workloads. They do not integrate well with third-party apps hosted inside virtual machines (usually the case in lift shift scenarios), or on-premises workloads or instances/applications hosted in other cloud providers. An enterprise-grade third-party backup software such as Veritas NetBackup protects the broadest range of applications including complex tier-1 applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL across clouds, providing a single pane of glass for multi-cloud data protection at significantly lower costs. Furthermore, NetBackup can help orchestrate and protect complex modern workloads such as Kubernetes (K8s) distributions. NetBackup provides the industry’s broadest support for K8s by providing the consistency and portability that teams need to protect any K8s distribution across any cloud.

Compliance and Governance: 40% of all cybersecurity breaches are due to shadow IT

Cloud exacerbates shadow IT, and as a result, applications often run the risk of being out of compliance, as data protection policies may not be applied consistently across the enterprise. This is particularly true for applications that have been migrated to the cloud. Ideally, new workloads should be auto-discovered, a default protection policy should be auto-assigned, and notifications should be sent to the users. In case of SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365, new users, mailboxes, and folders should be discovered and protected without administrator action. NetBackup and NetBackup SaaS Protection (NSP) address these enterprise governance and compliance challenges and more. NSP also supports metadata as well as full content indexing that enables keyword search and Personal Identifiable Information (PII) detection in the file contents.

In summary, as enterprises begin scaling in the cloud and applications become more complex, they must select the right backup platform which fits their needs. This helps reduces costs, provides ransomware resiliency and recovery assurance, protects a broad range of applications, and ensures compliance.

If you want to discuss any of the key points covered in this blog, feel free to reach out to the authors, or contact your local Veritas representative for more information. Data is based on an internal Veritas TCO analysis with 1-petabyte front-end data over three years.

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[1] Data is based on an internal Veritas TCO analysis with 1 petabyte front-end data over three years.