Alibaba Cloud offers multiple data protection solutions for data backup and disaster recovery. Choosing the wrong solution can lead to unmet business or compliance requirements and unnecessary costs. This topic compares the backup capabilities, restoration methods, costs, and benefits of different solutions by resource type (ECS, OSS, and File Storage NAS), helping you select the right solution for your workloads, strengthen business continuity, and meet compliance requirements.
Typical disaster scenarios of enterprises
The following are common disaster scenarios that data protection solutions are designed to address.
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Natural disasters: Disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fire, and tsunamis can cause corruption or loss of important data. To protect against such risks, in addition to local backups, we recommend that you replicate data to another data center in a different geographic area to protect data even in a regional disaster.
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Ransomware attacks: Ransomware spread through email attachments or malware encrypts user files and demands a ransom to unlock them. To defend against such attacks, enterprises must create local data backups and ensure that the backups are physically isolated from production data, or that the backups are immutable and undeletable to prevent them from being compromised. If virus detection can be performed on the backups, clean historical backup points can be quickly identified when data restoration is required after the production environment is attacked. This reduces the recovery time objective (RTO).
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Accidental data deletion: Data may be lost due to program defects, misoperations, or malicious destruction. Enterprises must create local data backups and ensure that separate permissions are required for accessing backups and production data. In addition, backups must be immutable and undeletable to prevent them from being tampered with or removed even in the worst case.
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O&M failures: Severe O&M errors can cause the business system to crash. In addition to local backups, we recommend that you configure remote backups as an additional safeguard. When the local environment fails, you can use remote backups to restore data.