Backup in the cloud?
In the cloud era, we have technically unlimited storage to store anything. From personal photos in OneDrive, business document in OneDrive for Business, or event collaboration artifact in Team files or SharePoint. Today, we put more in the cloud but put less in our on-premise location. The good story is when your connection is working well and your sync engine (OneDrive client) work well as expected. Let us see what the benefit of the cloud backup
- "technically" unlimited storage. You can request from 1 GB to Petabytes if you want. Backing up to the cloud means you no need to worry about space issues
- High availability by design. By default, you will find that the storage will be replicated at least three copies in Azure Storage. And if you need more, you can add more geographical backup.
- Flexibility backup. You can have premium backup on high performance SSD OR if you need cost-effective you can go to standard hard drive with 7200 rpm.
However, we have some challenges when we do a cloud backup
- The speed of the backup is related with your speed network. There might be some inefficiency when unstable network happens, such as reupload etc.
- In the cloud era data is generated from the cloud so there is no backup from the cloud to the on-premise. All the data is belonging to the cloud.
- The backup complexity. Imagine you have data from the cloud, and you have data from the on-premise. There should be synchronize each other to provide efficient backup
The relevancy of the on-premise backup
Just imagine your organization have some collaboration work to do and each people stored the collaboration file on a Teams. On Teams, you can click Sync button and it will sync to your account.
But imagine, if you are the organization and want to backup the entire teams, SharePoint, or even Azure VM. How you can do that? This is where the on-premise backup still relevant tin the cloud era. In the organization mindset all the document assets are owned by the organization. The question is how we backup the cloud to our on-premise solution?
NAS come to the rescue!
Whether you have PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS. You can download the files, virtual machine images, and document to your computer. But how if you need to backup the entire documents from your Teams Files? Or SharePoint Site? YES, You can use NAS (network attached storage) to do that. The NAS solution today is not like the old-day NAS solution who just plugged into your network and backup. Modern NAS such as Synology and others have a cool feature regarding with the cloud. Some of the key features are:
- Backup your legacy VM from Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure
- Backup your organization files with Active Backup for Microsoft 365 and G-Suite
- VM recovery or Web App recovery for your web app solution
On-premise Backup, is it still relevant in the cloud era?
So the answer of this question is yes! We still need on-Premise Backup for our organization, cloud can work better to provide high availability with the on-premise solution like NAS. Having NAS will become a good investment for the organization. They can enjoy the default benefit of NAS such as files sharing and local backup. Plus, some modern NAS like DS920+, DS720+, DS420+, and DS220+ can have additional features such as:
- Virtual Machine Manager. Virtual Machine Manager helps you to run VM in the NAS platform. As IT administrator. I face challenges to make my co-worker run their experiment in the cloud because the bottleneck of our organization internet connectivity. By using VMM, I can put my VM Image to NAS and when my co-worker the VM, I can give him the VM access and the VM is run on top of NAS. They don't need to access the internet. You can learn VMM here
- Active Backup for SaaS solution. If your organization have a lot of intellectual assets in the cloud such as Office 365 you can easily backup with Active Backup for Business. You can learn this free solution here.
- Hyper Backup for your PaaS and IaaS solution. If your organization has an Azure or AWS you can setup the recovery point and storage to NAS to provide quick backup-restore experience. You can learn the hyper backup solution here.
In the next post, we will do a simple experiment about NAS and SaaS (Microsoft 365). Happy weekend everyone