Amazon Web Services

Cloud Backup or Cloud Disaster Recovery – What’s the difference?

Shantha Kumari

Cloud Data Backup is not Cloud Disaster Recovery. One particular misunderstanding among the customers is about cloud backup, storage and disaster recovery. Its mainly due to the misrepresentation by the cloud vendors, and lack of background information on their part.

Many organizations are considering cloud backup because it eliminates tape-based backup technology, automates backups, removes the human capital component and other services like off-site tape storage fees.

Get your facts clear about Cloud Backup, Cloud Storage and Disaster Recovery with a free consultation with Sysfore cloud experts.

Before discussing about the difference, here is the definition of Cloud Storage, Cloud Backup, and Disaster Recovery.

The Cloud Defined

In the beginning stages of disaster recovery planning, decision makers are often mistaken about what constitutes a disaster recovery plan. Many times they are misled by the idea that data backup is sufficient precaution in the event of a disaster.

While having a backup strategy is important, it is not the same as a disaster recovery strategy; rather, the beginning stages of establishing a proper DR plan. A backup is a copy of your data; a disaster recovery plan is insurance that guarantees its recovery.

However, there is a misconception that cloud backups can improve an organization’s recovery time simply because it is a disk-based backup. In reality, it may take you longer than tape to restore.

There are three easy questions to ask to determine if a cloud backup service can work as part of your disaster recovery strategy:

  • Can you get your data from where it is in the cloud to where it needs to be for restoration and recovery and still meet your recovery time objective (RTO) requirements?
  • Can you perform your disaster recovery using additional cloud services from the same provider thus the data is where it needs to be for restoration and recovery of your critical systems in the cloud?
  • Can you regularly test either of these two scenarios (or both) as a part of your contract before locking in a long-term contract with the cloud backup provider you are considering.

So, what makes backups and disaster recovery different?

  1. Data retention requirements

Backups are typically performed on a daily basis to ensure necessary data retention at a single location, for the single purpose of copying data.

Disaster recovery requires the determination of the RTO (recovery time objective) in order to designate the maximum amount of time the business can be without IT systems post-disaster. Traditionally, the ability to meet a given RTO requires at least one duplicate of the IT infrastructure in a secondary location to allow for replication between the production and DR site.

  1. Recovery ability

Disaster recovery is the process of failing over your primary environment to an alternate environment that is capable of sustaining your business continuity.

Backups are useful for immediate access in the event of the need to restore a document. It does not facilitate the failover of your total environment should your infrastructure become compromised. They also do not include the physical resources required to bring them online.

  1. Additional resource needs

A backup is simply a copy of data intended to be restored to the original source.

DR requires a separate production environment where the data can live. All aspects of the current environment should be considered, including physical resources, software, connectivity and security.

  1. Planning process

Planning a backup routine is relatively simple, since typically the only goals are to meet the RPO (recovery point objective) and data retention requirements.

A complete disaster recovery strategy requires additional planning, including determining which systems are considered mission critical, creating a recovery order and communication process, and most importantly, a way to perform a valid test.

The overall benefits and importance of a DR plan are to mitigate risk and downtime, maintain compliance and avoid outages. Backups serve a simpler purpose. Make sure you know which solution makes sense for your business needs.

Sysfore can clear your misconceptions about Cloud Data Backup and Cloud Disaster Recovery. Get in touch through info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.

5 Big Cloud Security Features for Enterprise Use

Shantha Kumari

The cloud computing is still an emerging technology with people discovering its true potential. One important feature which draws attention is Cloud Security.

Cloud computing can help businesses cut costs in any number of ways, but the information that cloud systems handle is varied, confidential with high security measures in place.

Talk to Sysfore’s Cloud Specialists and we’ll ensure your Cloud Security is top grade. Book an appointment now.

Here are some of the biggest actual security features that cloud providers use to protect client data, and make systems effectively secure against hacking and unauthorized access.

Cloud security

Multi-Factor Authentication

It’s a major source of user security for cloud systems, which often get deployed across many different business locations and individual access points. Essentially, multi-factor authentication just means authenticating users in a combination of ways. Using multiple authentication strategies or factors creates better security for digital systems.

In general, multi-factor authentication involves combining different categories of security inputs. One category is the password, which is an intangible concept that someone creates and uses for access. Another category is a physical possession, such as a traditional key, a key card or even someone’s mobile device.

A third category of security is called biometrics. This focuses on things that are inherent to an individual body. Unlike the above two categories, biometrics security components cannot be lost or misplaced. Biometrics uses things like fingerprint scanning, voice recognition and facial imaging.

Multi-factor authentication requires two or more of these different security components to work together, which makes systems much more secure.

Identity and Access Management

This category of security is closely related to authentication, but it works a bit differently. Here businesses have a way to assign access and privileges to individual identities that will be authenticated within the system. If multi-factor authentication is the method of access, then identity and access management is the assignment of clearances or the “permission vehicle” for letting people into the system.

Cloud services should incorporate this design, so that managers can think carefully about what information people need access to, and assign access based on those considerations. It’s important that people who are doing the work can get into the system to do their jobs, but the system must also keep a lid on sensitive data and ensure that it’s distributed to as few people as possible.

Encryption Standards and Key Handling Tools

Encryption is a core component of cloud security. In various ways, cloud providers encrypt data so that it can’t be stolen or leaked as it makes its way to and around the cloud. Each cloud company will have its own security encryption standard, where better encryption generally means better security.

Encryption standard along with key handling should be the focus of the enterprises. Encryption systems typically use sets of encryption keys that allow for authorized use of the data. Businesses can now opt for Amazon Web Services or Azure which offers a set of key management tools. Some cloud providers also offer key management services of their own that not only encrypt data, but also preserve the right kinds of access.

Cloud Encryption Gateways

It’s also important to figure out how and when data is encrypted and when it is decrypted, because again, without decryption, valuable data can become useless to those who need to handle it.

A cloud encryption gateway is very much like a virtual private network or VPN system. It provides a secure tunnel for data from one specific point to another. In VPN systems, data is often encrypted as it leaves a private network and makes its way through the public Internet. It’s decrypted on the other side, which is why people refer to it as a “security tunnel” for data.

A cloud encryption gateway acts the same way. It provides a consistent means and method of encrypting data as it leaves the private network and enters the cloud. It’s going to serve as both an effective means of security, and maintaining compliance if regulators start looking into how a company handles its data.

Mobile Platform Security

Cloud security also needs to address the rapidly growing area of IT that so many of us are now using to do all kinds of computing and perform all kinds of transactions: mobile. The mobile arena is becoming more and more a part of our lives, and cloud services need to anticipate the challenges of keeping data safe while it’s going to and from mobile endpoints.

Cloud mobile strategy needs to look at effective encryption, any vulnerabilities inherent in mobile operating systems or commonly used mobile applications. They should be able to explain to clients in a way that doesn’t make their heads spin.

You can contact us at  info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555 to better understand the requirements of the Cloud Security for your Enterprise use.

Develop and Test on AWS

Shantha Kumari

Development and Test is the application of various tools and practices when producing software. Regardless of the type of software that is developed; a proper set of development and test practices is the key to success. However, producing applications not only requires software engineers, but also IT resources, which are subject to constraints like time, money, and expertise. This is where Amazon AWS Development and Test comes into the picture. It is a reusable, automated and elastic way of pushing your application to the market.

Dev and Test Benefits

The common traits which are seen developing a cloud application are:

  • Disposable – projects start & stop, required only for short durations, need experts.
  • Numerous – many environments, overlapping dev cycles, preservations of configurations.

When you use the Dev & Test in the AWS cloud, you benefit from:

  • Unlimited elastic capacity – utilize lots of it when you need it
  • Cost optimization – throw it away when you don’t need it, pay only what you use
  • Preserve for future references – durable imaging & storage

Unlimited elastic capacity allows you to utilize lots of it when you need it. The elastic datacenter allows to set up development and test environment for rolling out applications to production. You can test at scale before production.

To effectively use the AWS Development and Test environment in your software life cycle, the following should be kept in mind.

Relevant AWS services which you require for a Dev & Test environment are:

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • CloudFormation – creates application stack from reusable templates, creates resources in a dependency driven order, complete console support, predefined templates.
  • Amazon APIs and SDKs – Support for multiple platforms like Microsoft .NET, Java, PHP, Python, iOS etc.

Source Control

Developing and running your source code requires a secure, easily accessible and durable environment. It should scale easily and be reusable to enable quick and fast development of your code.

Developers can self manage their source control through self installed EC2 instances, using community AMIs and AWS marketplace.

Development Environments

Developers require the suitable environment to build their applications. This can be achieved via CloudFormation. Here a VPC can be created using the predefined templates which can be integrated with the Configuration Management Tools (like Puppet, Chef etc).

You can replicate the production environment by leveraging the AWS APIs, Amazon Relational Databases, Point in Time snapshots and adopt Infrastructure as a Code strategy. This ensures that they deliver an application with high code quality, is performance tested and debugged.

Test

Amazon allows various test scenarios involving unit tests, load, performance, integration, smoke, UAT tests to be executed. You can automate them to reduce time and effort. The best testing approach would be to use automation using the APIs, use either the AMIs or the CloudFormation template matching the production environment.

Agile Development

The time to market is a crucial factor for businesses to adopt the Agile development approach for their applications. Here developers must optimize their code for rapid response to changes (requirements, design, logic etc). It requires high technical discipline with lots of automated processes.

The Agile concept involve continuous code integration, using the infrastructure as code ensuring continuous delivery.

Code integration requires a source control, a CI server that ensures automated evaluation of quality.

Infrastructure as code is just programmatic provisioning by API. Everything in AWS is an API. You can call and utilize any of the tools such as Chef, AMI, Puppet etc on any platform like Java, iOS, PHP and more. The benefits of infrastructure as code is speed, reliability, repeatability and reduced risk.

The prerequisites for continuous delivery is small batch sizes of the code base in the production environment delivered through automation.

On a closing note, development and test practices in AWS requires certain resources at certain times for the development cycle. Amazon Web Services offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional development and test infrastructures. Instead of waiting weeks or even months for hardware, you can instantly provision resources needed, instantly scale up as the workload grows, and release resources when they are no longer needed.

Sysfore Technologies can guide in implementing a Development and Test environment which suits your business needs and requirements. You can contact our cloud development experts by mailing us at  info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.