Check out our companion blog!
Oct. 2, 2023

Hybrid Cloud Storage: Back it up or not?

In this episode of the Backup Wrap-Up, host W. Curtis Preston, also known as Mr. Backup, and his co-host Prasanna Malaiyandi, discuss the importance (or not) of backing up data in hybrid cloud storage systems, with a possibly surprising answer. The episode begins with backup-related news, followed by a deep dive into a single area or lesson that can help protect against ransomware. The news segment includes a story about Toyota, where multiple manufacturing plants shut down during their production process. Tune in for the answer to the question about backing up hybrid storage systems, and to learn more about data backup and disaster recovery systems.

Transcript

Speaker:

if you're using a hybrid cloud storage system that keeps a cache

 

Speaker:

of your data on premises and then stores the primary copy in the cloud.

 

Speaker:

You may be wondering if you need to back up this data.

 

Speaker:

If you're familiar with me, you might think you already know what

 

Speaker:

I'm going to say at this point.

 

Speaker:

And my answer might surprise you.

 

Speaker:

If you're not familiar with me.

 

Speaker:

Hi, I'm W.

 

Speaker:

Curtis Preston.

 

Speaker:

AKA Mister backup.

 

Speaker:

For over 30 years I've had a singular passion for helping

 

Speaker:

others protect their data.

 

Speaker:

With backup and disaster recovery systems.

 

Speaker:

Every episode of this podcast starts with a brief overview of backup

 

Speaker:

related news, followed by a deep dive, into a single area or lesson that

 

Speaker:

you can apply in your environment.

 

Speaker:

To protect you from horrible things like ransomware.

 

Speaker:

Welcome to the backup wrap up.

 

Speaker:

W. Curtis Preston: welcome to the show.

 

Speaker:

I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.

 

Speaker:

Backup, and I have with me my T 5 6 8 B consultant Prasanna

 

Speaker:

Malaiyandi, how's it going?

 

Speaker:

Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm good, Curtis, and it took me a second

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to realize what you talking about.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I knew you would figure it out though.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

'cause you know you got those little nerd bits up in your brain

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that just get activated when I say certain things, what is the T?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

5 6, 8 B and a.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it is the standard for how your ethernet cables are

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

run, whether which pairs go together.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And there are apparently two standards

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I think the A is the old B is the new.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they all work as long as, you do the same thing on both ends of the cable

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

. Prasanna Malaiyandi: unless you're building

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a crossover cable, in which yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Don't do that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I, the thing is I'm, I recently discovered that I have, what do you call it?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That the phone jacks in my house actually have RJ there, that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they have Cat six run to them.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so I'll be wiring them as ethernet ports and, so hence

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my interest in the subject.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But, let's get off of that nonsense and get right onto the news of the day.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You know what we need?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We need a, we need like a letter, like a wow.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

News of the day.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

let's start with our little story from a small, it's a startup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I believe it's a startup company.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's called T to Toyota

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's a small startup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I don't believe that they pronounced the second T

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

as a T

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Really Toyota.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how else would you pronounce

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think the, I think the official name was Toyota,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but they, I think they figured that Americans wouldn't

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

be able to pronounce that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

oh,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: interesting.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

this is a Japanese thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So what in the world happened over

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

at Toyota Prasanna

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, just something about them trying to make a bunch

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

of cars then for some reason a whole bunch of their manufacturing plants.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

14 Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: shut down

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

as they're trying to crank out.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So if you were waiting for the new

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Prius or the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

new Prius, or the new R four,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you might have Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: If you're on the li, if you're on the list of people

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

desperately trying to get a Prius Prime instead of just a Prius, this is why.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is the worst, is they were doing Scheduled maintenance on

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

their database, and they neglected to take into account the amount

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

of space necessary to do the task.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they ran out of storage space on their, production system, and it just

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

haled the production at a dozen factories.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I don't know what to say.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and the crazy thing is it's not like, oh, I've just got a free up space and I'm

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

boom, everything's gonna come back online.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like restarting a production

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is time consuming and very

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

hairy.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: you know, it reminds me, uh, when I was at the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

bank a hundred years ago, when.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The E p O button was pressed.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I won't say who it was me, . So shutting it down was easy.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Bringing the bag, the bank, nobody knew how to bring everything back online.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's probably the same thing here.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And here's the part that, just this sentence in this article from

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

bleeping computer.com, which I'll link to in the show description.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Toyota explains that its main servers and backup machines

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

operate on the same system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Due to this, both systems face the same.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Failure making a switchover impossible, inevitably leading

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to a halt in factory operations.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So they don't have

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

high availability

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: so

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or are they running like two virtual machines on the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Here's what I think that means.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They do have standby machines.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Maybe what this means, what they don't have is standby storage.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The storage was the thing that had the outage.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so since both the backup and the primary systems used the same storage,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that's not very highly available, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a single point of failure.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But Toyota, you're a big company.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

spend some money and hire a proper IT consultant to come in, or a storage

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

consultant to come in and plan your

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

storage.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm sure there are numerous companies who would like to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

come talk to you about buying

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

their products.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: exactly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Howard would love to talk you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Howard

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Marks

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: would, would this is a classic example of single point of failure

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so I, I really don't know what to say.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And what do we have is our second story, This one is actually,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think, more depressing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So it's from a, I don't know if it's a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

company or a news source called

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Beta News, and they recently published an article by Ian Barker saying

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that two out of three companies lose data due to failed backups.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And Curtis backups never fail.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Uh, so it was based on a survey from a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

company called aorn Acorn aorn,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, I

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: think so.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

an encrypted

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

drive

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: maker.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prasanna Malaiyandi: And it was a survey done

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in the uk, right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I'm sure things are so much better over here.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: not Here's the thing that I, when I looked at this

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

article, and again, we'll link to it in the show description, that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They said that this was a marked difference from the previous year.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They said a quarter of respondents say the ransomware has been the main cause

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

of a data breach and increase for 15%.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

32% is the people that, they had an unsuccessful recovery and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that was up from only 2% in 2022.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So a huge change.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The thing that I think says everything is they said that this

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

sharp . Increase un recoverability.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it was basically at the same exact time as there was a sharp

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

decrease in the level of automation.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What, you know what I'm talking about there?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

which makes sense, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because it's oh, you don't have automated processes in place, tools, et cetera.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you don't have those and how can you really verify that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

your backups were successful?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know Curtis, you like to talk about, verify your backups, make sure they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

work before you actually need them.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so if you don't have it, then that makes sense.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The other interesting thing in the article, which might go hand

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in hand with is they were also talking about how.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like with everyone working remotely, There was a lot of sort of self-service.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Let employees do their own backups, copy the data they want.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And we all know how that goes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

come on Curtis.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How often would you back up data on your

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If someone wasn't sitting there backing it up automatically.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I've never been a fan of backups that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

require manual intervention.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I understand that in some cases, that may be the only choice, but I think backups

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

should be a hundred percent automated that new systems that come online, for

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

example,, So like when you should be using auto selection and auto discovery

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and all of these things so that let's say you're backing up VMware and you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

add a new vm, that VM will automatically be protected by the backup system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You don't need to add it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think that anything that you can automate

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is possible.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

At least a base level, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It doesn't have to be like, oh, everything is like super duper protected, but

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

at least you have something going.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And just going to the example they gave about trusting

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

employees to copy their data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

if you don't wanna trust your employees, you could do things like Give them

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a one drive or a Google Drive and have them put their content there

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and that's where they're creating it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then you as a central admin, you now go back up that one repository rather

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

than trusting your users are doing

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we know how

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: goes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

exactly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I think that the thing that we can learn from this sort of story

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is an increase in manual backups is a decrease in recoverability.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And if you walk away with nothing else, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Walk away with that piece of information.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Is automation good, manual, bad when it comes to backups?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The more we can get the human outta the better.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I also wanna chime in on one thing, Curtis, I know

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you probably cut your teeth doing this way back when you started, but

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

even things like scripts, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

People may think scripts are automated, but scripts are not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: They're not bulletproof.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I wrote a lot of scripts back

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in my day, Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I remember, yeah, I remember that one year.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I remember writing 150 custom shell scripts to make a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

particular configuration work.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And it was just meant, and I'm sure every one of those broke at some point,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

, Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I wonder if any of 'em are still in use.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That was 20 years ago.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Probably not 23 years ago.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so I think it's time for our main topic today.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Our main topic today is going to be whether or not we need to back up

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

what I'm calling hybrid cloud storage.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how would you, how do you think we should define that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's funny, I know we recently just talked about

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like the public cloud, and if you ask Five years ago what the hybrid

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

cloud is, you'd probably get very different answers from different people.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think though what you're starting to see is people coming to the realization that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

hybrid cloud is Where you own some of the resources, maybe it's running in your own

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data center or somewhere like that, and you're also leveraging the benefits of

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the cloud, but you're not fully embracing the cloud like we talked about with the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

public cloud in the last episode, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's you're sending some bits and pieces of data leveraging services

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

where possible, where it makes sense, and otherwise you have a lot of your

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

applications still running in your data

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

center.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Now if we dig into what hybrid cloud storage is though, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's the capability where you basically are leveraging all the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

benefits of having cloud storage.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like we talked last time about infinitely available storage

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

with AWS's SS three, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Google has their own.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but in order to access that, you have a component running on premises.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in your data center, which your applications can talk to.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That way they don't need to rejigger themselves to talk to the cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They talk to that one appliance, and that one appliance is able to spread

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the data out amongst the cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Sometimes it keeps a local copy cached on that appliance, so then

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you get almost instant access, just as if the system, the storage, was

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

local

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so this is companies like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Nasuni Panera CTERA..

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: The idea is you get a box or multiple boxes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You put the data on that box, and then they use the magic of the cloud to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

make sure that that data is protected.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

everything that goes on that box is also copied into the cloud, but the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

box essentially acts as a cache.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the record of authority, I think is the one up in the cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But you're accessing a local cache of what's in the cloud, and then it's,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

through cloud magic, they're making sure that the current version, as well

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

as historical versions of those files or blocks, are stored in the cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Does that sound about right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, that sounds good.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And the other benefit that you see typically with this sort of hybrid cloud

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

storage is there are use cases where you have multiple remote offices all

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

who need to collaborate on a document.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like you see this in

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

CAD design.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or CAD firms, I should say.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so this is where you sort of have multiple people all collaborating and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

being able to synchronize and get access to the same files without necessarily

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

having multiple copies all spread out.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they all have their own CAD for performance reasons,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

especially with CAD files.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They're very

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so it's in that sense, it's like a big, much

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

more expensive, say Dropbox, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's both a, it's a collaboration tool as well as a on-prem storage solution.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And the one thing I wanted to correct, Curtis, I know you said they give you like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a box, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think we need to be careful these days.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like it's not always

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a physical box if that's what our listeners think, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Many times it's a software package that you install in a hypervisor, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And that gives it the functionality it needs.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It doesn't have to be a physical server,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: the hypervisor's on a box.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I still say . That's, I know what you're saying.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yes it is.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: a physical appliance that you're getting from this company.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, it's just an on-prem component.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That may be a physical box, it may be a VM running in your, virtualization world.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

question Prasanna, as is often

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the question

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How about I asked you the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Oh, okay.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'll ask you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And Curtis, I know that your stance has always been backup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Back up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

All the things.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Now in the case of, yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Back up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

All the things in the case of hybrid cloud storage, do I need to back it up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know we talked about public cloud last episode.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I know in the past we've talked about traditional data sources.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What's your take on hybrid cloud storage?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: So first off, let's start with the concept to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

back up all the things, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

assuming that the data that you're putting on there has value to the, your

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

organization, it needs to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Okay.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That the, there's just no question about that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The question I think that is appropriate to this scenario is whether or not.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it is being backed up, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think the first thing to think about is are there two copies, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then are there historical copies?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And the answer is, it depends.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

on

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: For, For, the recent data, there are definitely

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

two copies, right there is the copy on your local device.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There is the copy that is up in the cloud because by design, everything you put on

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the device is copied up into the cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So there you have two copies.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Depending on what you're syncing to, you could also argue that there are typically

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

three copies up there, because if you're syncing to SS three or something like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

S three, you are using object storage that is automatically replicating

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

its data to multiple locations.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So you have multiple locations that . Are subject to different risk profiles,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

assuming they're far enough apart.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But here's my thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Typically what you're storing though, in that case is probably

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

something that is in a native format for that stor storage appliance.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so you are at a single point of failure at that instance, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because if say something gets corrupt with metadata, Or if it's

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

for some reason unable to piece together what's been stored in the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

backend, like how do you know that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like the file table or the entire file system

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

with all the metadata has been backed up as well?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If something gets corrupt, how do you restore that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If someone deletes a file, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How do you do that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And Or if you need to restore, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Does that require you to completely spin up a new software appliance

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

somewhere and connect it in, and what does that look like?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I think while I agree with you that yes, you do have your copy in the cloud,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and so it meets all those principles, I think it depends what you're trying

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to recover from, which will determine if it's really a backup or if you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

really need to back it up or not.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so I think we're in agreement there.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I was just one thing at a time, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I was thinking first, let's think about the files.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Now we have to think about the file system and the configuration that you're right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That in this case, you, you're using essentially a cloud gateway.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The now, if it's the appliance itself that dies, or you're talking about the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

metadata, this sort of fancy file system, that metadata, is there a facility

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

within that to rebuild that metadata?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

based on what's ever, whatever's already up there, is there a way to rebuild

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that, assuming that gets corrupt?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the other thing is that file system, maybe the data is up there is fine

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and maybe the box is fine, but I, I I got a ransomware attack, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is the most common thing, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I got a ransomware attack and it attacked a Windows box that was s m b mounted

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to . or the box is s and b mounted to the windows box, and I was able to go in

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and, corrupt slash encrypt all the files connected to a project or a work group.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And now what we need is not just we haven't corrupted the file system

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

per se, as much as what we've corrupted is we've corrupted the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

current version of the file system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We need to be able to go back in time.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So that's the E, that's the other aspect is, do you have it in multiple

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

locations and then do you have different versions of it over time?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What is the company's answer to that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And that's where I think each company's probably gonna do something different.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And you gotta dig into the documentation, but it is, like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you said, an important question to ask as you're evaluating vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how do we recover from, fat fingering, deleting a file, fat fingering,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

deleting a directory, or accidentally deleting a whole bunch of files.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then of course, the,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the, what do you call it, the, the ransomware attack.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Thank you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The other thing to add to that list, Curtis, is also what happens when metadata

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in the file system gets corrupted.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: So what happens if the Yeah, exactly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Whatever this magic is that's taking all those objects and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

pretending they're a file system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

'cause that's essentially what we're doing, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we're taking a bunch of objects stored up in object storage, and we're making

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it look like it's a file system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What happens if that gets messed up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How do you recover from that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think one thing though, that it would be interesting to get your take on this is I.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

,when you're doing these backups, you're now locked into

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that vendor's format, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because it's a vendor's file system that is being versioned, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Let's assume they have versioning, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They're able to protect again.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So all those scenarios that we talked about, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There may still be something to consider that you may want it to be

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

agnostic to that vendor's format,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: It's a very good point.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The best analogy that I have to, this is NetApp, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We go back to NetApp, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I knew you were going there.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: So they had all this stuff, they got

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

all this replication, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What did people want?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They wanted the ability to back up that data and put it in another format.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And which for a record or for, for the record.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's what I didn't like about N D M P.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, I mean, I, I always saw N D P as like a necessary evil because it was

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the better way to back up a NA box.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But one of the things I never liked about N D M P was that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

. Prasanna Malaiyandi: History.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: the backup in a format that was only usable on that platform.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So that was a, it was, by the way, it was the only way they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

were able to make it happen.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because they were able to say to all the NAS vendors, of which at

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the time they were probably four or five, they said, look, you can use

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

whatever backup format you want.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is a protocol.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is a, this is an IO protocol.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's not a backup format protocol.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You don't have to go.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, but that's what I didn't like about it, is that it wasn't portable.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Until you got a company like Avamar who was able to crack

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the code and allow the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

restores to different file

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

systems.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Even there, like they were able to do that for

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

NetApp, but they didn't necessarily do it for other For other vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm assuming that the code for U F S dump is available out there somewhere.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so it probably wasn't rocket science to crack that particular backup format,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but yeah, you make a real, that's a really valid point, is to make sure

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that you at least discuss that question.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What do we, what is our plan if and when, The feces hits the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

rotary oscillator for this product.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What is our plan?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And because if you're a hundred percent tied into them and you're,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it's the whole vendor, tie in and I'm sure they're very happy with that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Vendor lockin,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I'm sure they're very happy with that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The question is, what is your plan if and when you ever choose,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to do something different?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep, yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's important to at least ask that question upfront because you may not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

ever consider another vendor for Ever right, But it's at least an important

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

question to ask upfront because if there's a huge switching cost, that's

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

something you should take, into

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so quick answer is yes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Every piece of data needs to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The longer answer is you need to make sure that you've got the location dealt with.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You've got to make sure that you have a recovery plan for when you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

get attacked by a ransomware bot, and it just encrypts your entire

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

System, does that encrypt your history?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Does that encrypt all the versions?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Does that all that encryption automatically replicate to the cloud?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

'cause the answer is yes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So the question is how do I go back to before the encryption happened,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

what's, what's that process?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then I think, you know your point about whether or not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you've got backups that are.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Have the ability to go back to a different vendor, assuming you want to do one.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my dru would also be in the backend to have that, to have the data also

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

replicated to a, an inexpensive copy in another cloud provider.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That would be my dream.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That may actually be possible with some of these vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you're replicating both to.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Let's just assume, for example, that the only thing you care about is the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

active data, at least per the only.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

One where you care about performance is the active data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You want to keep the historical stuff, but you don't wanna

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

spend a lot of money on it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So what would be nice is if the Cloud copy could be something like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Glacier Deep Archive with Instant Restore, pay the instrument, restore

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

fee, and then also copy that to the equivalent on Azure or Google.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And now you've got two independent copies of the data, with history.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's cool.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, and I think what they would probably end

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

up doing, what the vendor would do is they might support two cloud

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

targets rather than trying to copy data just because cloud egress costs are

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh, I see what you're saying.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You're saying that it'll just send it to both, uh, vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Cloudy res, , cloudy, gress costs are very real.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and I know Curtis, we like to talk about it

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a lot on this podcast, but test your recovery scenarios If you are

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

using a hybrid cloud storage, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Test it with some of these, test what happens when you delete a file, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Can you restore it, do it before you actually need

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And don't do it like our friend in Alaska did it by deleting all

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

your data and then testing it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

this is, this is what the cloud is for, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, te you could probably spin up a copy, in the cloud, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I can't agree with you more, and we can't say that enough.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Is that, the only backup that is truly valid is one that's

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

been tested in recovery.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Exactly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, I think we covered that topic and hopefully answered the question.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you disagree or strongly agree, we'd love to hear from you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can reach me atCurtis@backupwrapup.com.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

After recording this episode, I had a chance to see one of these

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

vendors present a tech field day.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

CTERA talked about their edge filer and how it can replace your on-premises

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Nass infrastructure with a global file system that is automatically stored in

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

his many cloud accounts and vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

As you ask it to use.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It also automatically stores all versions of every file and stores them in an area

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that they say is air gapped and immutable.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I will say I didn't have enough time to dig deep on those claims.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I would suggest you do so.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

From a data protection standpoint, the most exciting feature they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

talked about was ransom protect.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They monitor all of file activity using AI after the number of suspicious

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

events that you specify, they can alert the appropriate number of people.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

In any monitoring tools that you have automatically blocked

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the offending end point.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And allow the admin to roll back any encrypted files.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They claim to be able to detect and stop the ransomware

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

attack within about 30 seconds.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then they can roll back any files and only a few minutes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That sounds a whole lot better than anything else I've seen.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I did ask them about monitoring for suspicious reads as well as rights.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If they were able to detect suspicious reads, they could also

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

stop an exfiltration attack, which is quickly becoming the standard.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

In fact, most cyber attackers are performing exfiltration

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

before they begin any encryption.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It seems like they have the tools and logic in place to be able to do this.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they did say that they were looking into it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I will eagerly await their update.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Although I stand by our podcast from two weeks ago where we said that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

perhaps we get a little too excited about new tools and not enough emphasis

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

on things like process and people.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I do think it's still okay to get excited about new tools.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So this is, I think very interesting.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I hope you've enjoyed this, uh, first actual episode with our

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

new name, the backup wrap up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This has been a production of backup central.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Edited and produced by yours truly.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Any opinions that you hear are those of that speaker and not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

necessarily their employer.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This has been the backup wrap-up.