Organizations of all sizes have incorporated cloud backups into their data protection strategy. The benefits of cloud backup solutions are hard to ignore. Companies leveraging cloud backups eliminate the need to implement and maintain on-premises backup infrastructure, saving money and freeing employees for other tasks. Cloud backups also offer scalability that is hard to replicate with traditional backup methods.
Companies cannot rely on insecure backups to protect their valuable data or to recover from data loss incidents. Businesses must ensure the security of their backups, whether they use a cloud or on-premises solution. Decision-makers should strongly consider implementing the following cloud backup best practices to safeguard their backups.
Encrypt All Backups
Companies must ensure that their cloud backups are encrypted at all times. Threat actors often target backups, and unauthorized users can easily access unencrypted data. Unencrypted backups present a critical vulnerability that can be eliminated with a secure cloud backup solution.
Data must be protected in transit using encryption as it is transmitted from the customer’s infrastructure to the cloud provider’s storage with TLS 1.2/1.3. Cloud providers should encrypt the data at rest with methods such as AES-256. Businesses should favor customer-managed encryption keys, giving themselves ultimate control over decrypting their data. The keys must be stored securely using a robust key management service (KMS).
Adopt the 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Rule
Businesses face an evolving threat landscape that includes sophisticated ransomware attacks, cloud service failures, and insider accidental or deliberate data deletions. These threats have made traditional views on the number and types of backups obsolete. Modern businesses should adopt the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule to provide comprehensive data protection.
- 3 – Companies should always keep at least three copies of their data. The copies include the original data and at least two backups.
- 2 – Two different media types should be used to store backups, for example, external hard drives and cloud storage.
- 1 – One backup copy should be kept offsite, for example, in the cloud, to provide data protection for physical disasters.
- 1 – One backup copy should be immutable or stored entirely offline to prevent corruption or encryption from ransomware. Immutable backups are typically created using write-once-read-many (WORM) technology and are necessary to protect company data fully.
- 0 – The backups must contain zero errors so they can be restored to recover systems and data assets effectively.
Automate Backup Processes
Organizations should automate their backup processes to eliminate manual steps that can lead to missed or failed backups and data protection gaps. Failed backups present a significant risk that can render recovery efforts impossible. Teams can use these measures to improve the consistency and availability of viable, complete backups:
- Scheduling backups automatically to align with their data protection policies;
- Enforcing policy-based retention to address specific categories of data assets;
- Monitoring backup jobs in real-time for failures and addressing them promptly;
- Tracking backup performance to optimize the process.
Align Cloud Backup Retention With Regulatory Compliance
Businesses that process regulated data must take additional measures to ensure compliance. Teams must define and verify cloud backup retention parameters based on data type to meet regulatory standards. Companies should be able to hold backps to meet legal requirements with well-documented retention policies. Cloud providers must delete data securely once the retention period expires.
Separate Access to Production and Backup Data
Companies must safeguard their cloud backups from the threat of compromised credentials. Threat actors often leverage stolen IDs and passwords obtained through phishing to gain access to the production environment where they can corrupt or destroy data resources. If an attacker has the same access to backups, they can cause extensive damage by preventing recovery.
Practical steps to mitigate this problem include:
- Establishing separate accounts and permissions for production and backup data;
- Enforcing least-privilege access to backups;
- Monitoring backup access logs to identify anomalies;
- Requiring MFA for backup administrators.
Define and Test Recovery Objectives
Organizations should develop recovery plans that align with business requirements, for example, restoring mission-critical systems in an appropriate timeframe. Teams should define recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) that determine how quickly systems must be restored and how much data loss can be tolerated. Companies should configure cloud backup frequency to meet these objectives.
Companies should perform regularly scheduled recovery tests to ensure the viability of their restore procedures, RPOs, and RTOs. Recovery teams should validate backups with application-level testing. Decision-makers should document and review test results to remediate issues before a true recovery is necessary.
Protect Cloud-Native and SaaS Data
Businesses should not assume that standard cloud backup solutions completely back up cloud application data. Teams need secure backups that can fully restore SaaS data from platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, as well as container workloads. Companies must understand the shared responsibility for backing up data and implement backup solutions that specifically target this essential data resource.
Utilize Geo-Redundant Storage
Cloud backup providers offer businesses enhanced resilience and data protection by storing backups in multiple geographic regions. This approach eliminates the dependency on a single area that may be affected by a large-scale disaster or outage. The advantage of geo-redundant storage is a cloud backup benefit that cannot be easily replicated with traditional backup solutions.
VAST’s Cloud Backup and Recovery Solutions
VAST’s technical teams have extensive experience with tailoring cloud and on-premises backup solutions to fit our customers’ business requirements and objectives. Our expertise has led to the development of a cloud backup-as-a-service (CBaaS) offering that provides companies of any size with a secure, reliable cloud backup solution.
The CBaaS solution is built on Druva’s advanced data protection technology and provides end-to-end encryption and immutable backups to safeguard your valuable information. It’s a fully-managed cloud-based backup solution that supports your organization’s data protection policies. We offer fixed pricing to streamline budgeting, and our solution eliminates the need to implement and maintain on-premises backup infrastructure.
CBaaS is designed to address your business requirements with four focused backup solutions that offer complete data protection. The service supports backing up:
- Microsoft 365 and other Saas data;
- Public cloud environments;
- On-premises and hybrid data centers;
- Enterprise endpoints.
Talk to our cloud backup experts today and learn more about how VAST’s CBaaS provides your business with secure cloud backups.
