A Guide to Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery – Communications of the ACM

The persistent risk of data loss pushes organizations to continuously look for ways to safeguard their data and infrastructures. Integrating data protection workflows can enhance data resilience and help support production continuity after major IT incidents. Managed backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services are among the most effective solutions that provide high availability of business data.

BDR is a suite of managed services that allows organizations to create data backups and configure disaster recovery workflows that can be initiated in case of emergencies.

In this post, we review the key concepts and elements of managed backup and disaster recovery. This includes processes and practices that an organization can plan and implement with a service provider to ensure efficient data protection.

What is Managed Backup?

Managed backup is an IT service that specialized experts provide to regularly back up and store the data of client organizations. Normally, a managed backup service sends backups to a remote or cloud storage controlled by the provider. The capabilities of modern services go above and beyond the simple creation of data copies, adding managing, monitoring, and recovery of an organization’s data whenever necessary.

The managed backup service can help organizations ensure data security, availability, and recoverability. Whenever a data loss incident occurs at the main site due to a ransomware attack, a hardware failure or a natural disaster, the data copy at the provider’s site remains accessible.

SMBs and enterprises can benefit from managed backup through improved data security, service scalability, reduced risk of data loss, and fast DR workflows. Additionally, managed backup services enhance data governance and help ensure regulatory compliance, including that for GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. Lastly, the workflows and storage are the provider’s responsibility which means that organizations don’t have to invest in hardware, setup and maintenance of a backup site.

Key features of managed backup solutions

The most effective features of modern managed backup services include:

• Automated backups—the amount of data to back up even in a small organization can be too large to back up manually. Automation ensures both scheduled and on-demand backups cover business-critical data.
• Scalability—data volume grows along with the business and effective backup services provide scalability for performance and storage to satisfy clients’ evolving requirements.
• Security and compliance—service providers follow the latest IT trends and keep track of legislative requirements. Their solutions can deliver the required level of security and compliance to clients.

What is Managed Disaster Recovery?

Managed disaster recovery services are designed to help organizations avoid data loss by entrusting DR systems to qualified experts. By doing so, businesses offload the data recovery process to specialists and save additional resources. These additional financial, compute, and human resources can then be used to maintain and boost production and subsequently revenue.

DR functionalities are usually combined with multi-featured data protection solutions for managed service providers. NAKIVO Backup for MSPs is one such solution that includes backup, recovery, replication, IT monitoring, and disaster recovery. The main purpose of managed recovery systems is to help organizations quickly recover infrastructures after global incidents such as power outages, hardware malfunctions, or natural disasters.

The value of managed disaster recovery (MDR) solutions lies mainly in their affordability and customer support. An organization integrating MDR does not need to assemble a DR site, set up the required software, or configure workflows and parallel networks. The setup and maintenance of the site, as well as that of the DR workflows, is the vendor’s job.

Key components of Managed Disaster Recovery

Vendors with reliable DR systems provide clients with the following:

• Disaster recovery planning—a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is the cornerstone of successful data recovery and operational continuity.
• Data replication and synchronization—to restore the production environment and minimize data loss after incidents, a vendor needs reliable replication and data synchronization solutions. These ensure backup integrity at the moment of disaster, fulfilling the client’s requirements for recovery point and recovery time objectives. 
• Failover and failback mechanisms—failover to a secondary site at the moment of disaster and failback to the main environment after fixing the issues are crucial to ensuring production continuity for clients.

Developing a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

A complete BDR plan is key to successfully protecting your organization’s data and infrastructure when a global IT incident strikes. The five main steps for an effective plan are:

1. Assess your risks—a thorough risk assessment can help you identify the specific threats to your industry, organization, and IT environment.
2. Identify critical data and systems—prioritizing workloads and records by importance enables you to identify what you need to restore as quickly as possible and which systems can wait without a critical impact on production.
3. Establish backup and recovery objectives—by understanding which data you can afford to lose and how much downtime your organization can tolerate, you can set up suitable RPOs and RTOs.
4. Choose appropriate technologies and services—your managed backup and disaster recovery solution must correlate with the specifics of your environment. For instance, organizations running virtualized environments require BDR services that can efficiently back up VM data.
5. Document and implement the plan—noting down every element of the BDR plan together with your service vendor ensures that you get the required service within the desired time.

Testing and maintaining the BDR plan

Once the backup and disaster recovery plan is complete, consider the two points below:

• Regular drills and simulations—regular testing of your BDR workflows is the most reliable way to ensure proper recoverability of data and environments. Modern solutions enable non-disruptive testing, allowing you to maintain production performance during regular BDR “health checks.”
• Continuous monitoring and improvement—data threats keep evolving, and so should your managed backup and disaster recovery plans. Consider integrating a solution that provides monitoring capabilities and regularly receives new features and updates.

Future Trends in Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery

Client needs and MDR capabilities are developing along with the evolution of information technologies. Data threats also are becoming more sophisticated, increasing the probability of security breaches and data loss incidents.

Emerging technologies and BDR services

Today, the most noteworthy technologies changing BDR approaches and capabilities are AI, machine learning, and cloud.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning enhance the analytical capabilities of security solutions and increase the accuracy of threat prediction. Additionally, automation algorithms are becoming more intelligent, enabling proactive protection and expanding the choice of problem-solving tools. For example, using trained AI to analyze historical backup data and highlight the most problematic points for potential failures can help organizations fix security vulnerabilities and set optimal backup schedules. Moreover, BDR vendors can optimize storage space consumption and network load with AI-backed data compression and deduplication. In addition, AI encryption algorithms can be more efficient in preventing unauthorized access to backups.

Cloud technologies changed data storage and management practices. Today’s cloud-native backup solutions enable managed backup and disaster recovery vendors to offer more cost-effective and versatile services. Clients can benefit from the high availability of cloud solutions to get more flexibility and operational efficiency without sacrificing data resilience, security, and recovery speed.

Conclusion

Managed backup and disaster recovery is a service that the provider (MSP) delivers to client organizations to ensure data protection and restore IT infrastructures after global failures. A robust BDR vendor offers workflow automation, scalability, and security, along with thorough planning, efficient data synchronization, and replication of workloads.

Developing a detailed backup and disaster recovery plan requires assessing risks, prioritizing data and systems, setting suitable recovery objectives, choosing appropriate technologies, and having a complete BDR document. Regular testing and continuous monitoring can help your organization protect data from loss or theft and maintain production continuity.

Alex Tray is a system administrator and cybersecurity consultant with 10 years of experience. He is currently self-employed as a cybersecurity consultant and as a freelance writer.