The other day I stumbled across a link to an article, Why you should stop buying servers. The title was interesting enough to grab my attention so I had a quick peruse through it. It’s an article about why you should start using the cloud rather than buying local infrastructure.
While initially I was reasonably skeptical of cloud, that view has been tempered over time. When handled correctly, cloud or cloud-like services will definitely be a part of the business landscape for some time to come. (I personally suspect we’ll see pendulum swings on cloud services in pretty much exactly the same way as we see pendulum swings on outsourcing.)
The lynch pin in that statement above though is when handled correctly; in this case, I was somewhat concerned at the table showing the merits of cloud servers vs local servers when it came to backup:
This comparison to me shows a key question people aren’t yet asking of cloud services companies:
Do you understand backup?
It’s not a hard question, but it does deserve hard answers.
To say that a remote snapshot of a virtual server represents an offsite backup in a single instance may be technically true (minus fine print on whether or not application/database consistent recovery can be achieved), but it’s hardly the big picture on backup policies and processes. In fact, it’s about as atomic as you can get.
I had the pleasure of working with an IaaS company last year to help formulate their backup strategy; their intent was clear: to make sure they were offering business suitable and real backup policies for potential customers. So, to be blunt: it can be done.
As someone who has worked in backup my entire professional career, the above table scares me. In a single instance it might be accurate (might); as part of a full picture, it doesn’t even scratch the surface. Perhaps what best sums up my concerns with this sort of information is this rollover at the top of the table:
Several years back now, I heard an outsourcer manager crowing about getting an entire outsourcing deal signed, with strict requirements for backup and penalties for non-conformance that didn’t once mention the word recovery. It’s your data, it’s your business, you have a right and an obligation to ask a cloud services provider:
Do you understand backup?
Many years ago, a vendor once said to me that backups weren’t important. As I was trying to figure this out, especially as he was trying to sell me a backup solution, he gave the punchline:
…but recoveries are.
He ultimately got my business.
A great outsourcer, then.