Backup Essentials Part Three

It's time for part three of this series. What we're discussing here is what to keep in mind when selecting your backup solution. The factors we'll be discussing include: data availability, administrative cost of the solution, portability, and security.

Data Availability
This factor is always a balance that has to be struck between how quickly you need to get at your backed up data, and how resilient you want your solution to be. For example on one end you could merely have your data backed up to a drive attached to the source machine. This would give you the fastest access to it, but at the cost of a single point of failure. On the other end of the spectrum you can have the data backed up to offsite location(s). This would give you the most protection as any harm to your office is far from your data, but also increases the amount of time required for access. Ultimately you either want to have some form of both, a solution that is highly portable (physically moving storage and compatible with your equipment) or even better has all of the above.

Portability
Perhaps one of the more overlooked factors is how portable your backup solution is physically. This becomes a point of particular importance when you have backups that are at an offsite location. For most organizations that aren't in the 'large' category it is unlikely that you'll have a fiber link running across to your offsite location. So if/when an emergency strikes your main office you need to be able to physically move the data and then make use of local link speeds. Remember this when choosing your solution as the ability to do this can vary greatly depending on what sort of hardware requirements are involved, and the manner in which the software operates.

Administrative Cost
One of the banes of the small IT shop is the near impossibility of its associates to truly specialize. The needs of the business, and likely size of available staff tend to demand that the technician/administrator/engineer in this role be a generalist. It's important to keep this mind when picking your backup solution, as it would be a terrible situation to need to conduct a restore, but have no experts in its use to conduct it. If the product requires a significant amount of additional training to operate it can end up costing the business significant resources. The cost is incurred doubly so if the training itself isn't of a certain caliber as well. The long and short is that 'simple' and 'intuitive' should be your watch words here.

Security
The manner in which your data is stored and transmitted is obviously important. Looking around you are likely to find that most if not all of the notable solutions out there at the very least transmit data in an encrypted manner between target and source. The differentiator here is going to be the manner in which its stored after the job is complete. Do you have the option to encrypt the data? If you use third party encryption does it effect their storage format? Checking this functionality is especially important for those of you in the medical field who have to comply with HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Also consider the discrimination of data here. For example if I log onto one target machine am I capable of pulling data down to it that belongs to another? While it may sound convienent if the answer is yet, it does create a bit of a security vulnerability if one of your target machines were compromised. If your business in a field with confidential data you certainly want to make sure that you have the ability to discriminate and control which clients can access which data.

Truth be told an entire article could be written about each of these factors. These basic thoughts act as an effective guide in researching backup solutions and implementing them into your infrastructure. If anyone would like to discuss the topic in greater detail with me, feel free to comment or shoot me an email: koch.ryan@gmail.com.

Backup Essentials Part Two

For part two of this series we will begin the planning phase. In this phase we'll take an inventory, categorize our data, decide backup types, figure out our backup window, and figure out storage requirements. For this example we will use a small test environment representing the size of a 10 employee company as mentioned in the introduction.

First we'll knock out the inventory. The test infrastructure has a mix of desktops, servers, and remote laptops. I've gone ahead and included a list of these below:

6 desktops of a similar configuration (general user machines)
1 SQL Server (HR)
1 Exchange Server
1 Web server
1 Domain Controller
3 Remote laptops

Having this list we will now need to set priorities. To do this we need to break down an analyze what this business would need to operate, and what it has that merely makes it operate better/more efficiently. While simple, the prioritization below will help us in making decisions on backup types as well as scheduling and storage.

Need to operate:
Domain Controller
Exchange Server
SQL Server
Web Server

Makes business more effective:
Desktops
Remote laptops

Next we need to discuss what backup types are available to us. In general the various backup solutions will give you the ability to do file level backups, service/application backups, and image level backups. In general the decision of which level to use with which machine depends on what expectation of recovery time you have, the location of the machines, and what the machine is being used for. In our case the desktops, and the remote laptops will require a file level backup. The servers will all require an image level backup, a file level backup, and a service level backup.

After deciding what backup types we're using we also need to decide how this fits into our disaster recovery strategy. Do we need any of this data to be backed up to an offsite location? In our scenario it seems clear that the SQL Server,Exchange Server, Domain Controller, and Web Server all need to be backed up to a remote location. These services should be able to be brought backup at a remote office or home office in the event that the main office is brought down by a disaster of some sort for any extended period of time.

The last two factors to consider are scheduling and storage. For scheduling you have to figure out what your organization's 'production' hours are. This will allow you to create a backup window that will exist to minimize the impact your backup jobs have on the ability of  users to operate. For example if the office is open from 8am-5pm then an effective backup window might be from 7pm-6am. This will give a 2 hour buffer both on the beginning and ending side of the window in case someone stays late, or a backup job runs too long. A lot of the decision is going to be unique to your organization and its needs. Storage is also going to be a bit unique as the requirements are going to be different from backup solution to backup solution. Depending on if you choose to go with an appliance, or software you may or may not have to purchase your own hardware. To fully implement a backup and recovery policy however you are going to want to arrange for some sort of storage system on site at your office, as well as another one at some off site location be it an off site data center, or even someone's home office.

That about covers are basic planning stage. The next article will cover what we need to consider in order to pick and implement a solution. There may even be pictures in that one (screenshots).