Cloud Backup is a unified disaster recovery platform from Alibaba Cloud that provides data backup, disaster recovery protection, and policy-based archive management.
The need for data disaster recovery
Data disaster recovery is a vital way for businesses to protect core data. It helps reduce data loss and corruption caused by ransomware, system failures, natural disasters, and O&M accidents. It also helps businesses meet industry security and compliance requirements.
Data risks
Business data faces threats from ransomware, system failures, natural disasters, and O&M accidents. These threats can cause unexpected data loss and damage, which can have a major impact on your business.
Industry security and compliance requirements
Various industry standards and regulations, such as the Classified Protection of Cybersecurity 2.0, the Personal Information Protection Law, and the Regulation on the Security Protection of Critical Information Infrastructure, clearly state the need to maintain data integrity, confidentiality, and availability.
For example, in 2020, a core employee of a company deleted a database without authorization. This action crashed the company's Software as a Service (SaaS) business, halted business for millions of merchants, and caused the company's market value to drop by billions of Hong Kong dollars.
For example, in 2020, a server at a major factory was attacked by ransomware. 30 TB of data was encrypted, and the attacker demanded a ransom of CNY 230 million.
Advantages of cloud disaster recovery
Compared with traditional on-premises data center disaster recovery solutions, a cloud disaster recovery solution has clear advantages in terms of cost, deployment speed, and O&M:
Item | Cloud Backup solution | Traditional on-premises data center disaster recovery solution |
Total cost of ownership (TCO) | Pay-as-you-go billing reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO). | High upfront costs for software and hardware procurement. |
Deployment speed | Alibaba Cloud services can be deployed quickly and are available on demand. | Deployment takes months or years. |
O&M investment | Highly scalable, reliable, and fully managed. | Complex O&M requires significant human resources. |
Robustness | You can enable geo-redundancy with one click for multiple layers of protection. | Regional natural disasters can cause data loss. |
Walkthrough | On-demand at any time without impacting production. | Preparation is time-consuming and expensive. |
Cloud Backup benefits
Technical advantages
Efficiently deduplicates data and accurately detects duplicates.
Item
Description
Feature
Existing data segments in the backup vault are not transferred again. Variable-length slicing accurately identifies duplicate data. Only new data segments are uploaded and backed up.
Advantage
Efficient data deduplication and compression technology achieves a deduplication ratio of up to 30:1. In some scenarios, a backup product without a deduplication feature requires 30 times more backup storage space than Cloud Backup.
Value
Reduces your backup storage costs. This lets you retain historical backup versions for a long time within your budget. For hybrid cloud scenarios, source-side deduplication also saves on cloud migration bandwidth.
O&M advantages
Fully automatic backups and proactive monitoring.
Item
Description
Feature
Flexibly customize full, incremental (differential), log, and real-time backup policies. Receive alerts through multiple channels such as text messages and email. View backup history and error log reports in the console.
Advantage
Configure a policy once for a fully managed backup process. End-to-end backup jobs are monitored automatically, with automatic alerts for errors.
Value
The fully managed service requires minimal human resources. The backup system is self-managing, which ensures data security.
User experience advantages
Cloud Backup provides an intuitive and easy-to-use console. The console includes a list of database backup plans, a disaster recovery overview graph, runway-style recovery points for file backups, and one-click disaster recovery drills.
Item
Description
Feature
For various backup scenarios, such as file, database, and ECS disaster recovery, the interface is designed for ease of use. Step-by-step guidance is provided for backup and disaster recovery.
Advantage
Backup plans, backup points, and recovery points are clear at a glance. Complex disaster recovery operations are made easy.
Value
Easy to get started with a low learning curve. The impact of O&M engineer turnover is minimal.
Security enhancement advantages
To improve the security of data backups, prevent accidental operations or malicious attacks from inside your enterprise, and stop unauthorized users from backing up or restoring data, Cloud Backup helps you meet security and compliance requirements. Cloud Backup provides KMS encryption, immutable backups, and separation of backup and recovery permissions. For more information, see Separate backup and recovery permissions.
Item
Description
Feature
KMS encryption
Immutable backup
Separation of backup and recovery permissions
Advantage
Configure from the console. Enable KMS encryption and immutable backups with a single click. The configuration is simple.
Value
Improves the security of data backups. Prevents accidental internal operations, malicious attacks, or unauthorized backup and restoration of data to meet security and compliance requirements.
In summary, compared with building a backup system in a self-managed data center or building your own backup system on the cloud, Cloud Backup has the following advantages:
Comparison Criteria | Manual backup | Cloud Backup |
Permission management | None. Manual backups lack strict permission management, which can easily lead to accidental data deletion. | Yes. Cloud Backup uses RAM to assign tiered permissions to operators, restricting their access to authorized resources. |
Deduplication and compression | None. Duplicate data from repeated backups increases storage costs and reduces backup speed. | Yes. Cloud Backup uses proprietary Alibaba Cloud data deduplication and compression technologies. This reduces I/O traffic and backup storage usage, which increases backup speed and saves costs. |
Backup alerting | None. If a backup fails, it cannot be detected without manual tracking. Sometimes, a failed backup is only discovered during a restoration attempt. | Yes. The Cloud Backup alerting feature can send notifications to backup personnel if a backup job fails or the client disconnects from the server. |
Lifecycle of backup data | Manual management | Automatic management |
Geo-redundancy | None | A mirror vault is a geo-redundant mirror of a backup vault. Use a mirror vault to perform cross-region backups. You can also use a mirror vault to perform cross-region restorations. For more information, see Cross-region backup. |
Data restoration | Requires manual consolidation of multiple recovery replicas. | Cloud Backup displays backup versions clearly, making it easy to select one for restoration. You can also set restoration rules. |
Management costs | High. Manual backups require writing scripts and dedicated management staff. The overall O&M is complex and difficult, leading to low resource utilization and high management costs. | Low. With Cloud Backup, you just host your backup data in our cloud backup vaults. You do not need to worry about hardware provisioning, configuration, cluster scaling, or security. |
Data encryption | Requires a self-built solution | Fully automatic data encryption and validation. Backup data is encrypted at the source with AES-256 or KMS before it is transferred to the cloud and stored in an encrypted format. The transmission channel is further secured with HTTPS encryption, and data is validated across the entire link. For more information, see Separate backup and recovery permissions. |
Immutable backup | None | Supports immutable backup vaults based on the Write Once, Read Many (WORM) model. This adds an extra layer of protection to your backup vaults. For more information, see Separate backup and recovery permissions. |
High data availability | Manual management | Provides multi-replica redundancy for backup vaults and supports zone-redundant storage. For more information, see Backup vaults. |
References
To learn about the features of Cloud Backup, see Features and Limits.
If you activate the Cloud Backup service without performing any backup operations, no fees are generated. You are charged only when you perform backup operations in the Cloud Backup console. For more information about specific billable items, see Billing methods and billable items.
Activating the Cloud Backup service only means you have successfully enabled the service. It does not automatically back up any data. We strongly recommend that you use the features of the service to back up your important data. Note that if you only activate the service without backing up data, any lost or accidentally deleted data cannot be recovered. For more information about activation, see Activate Cloud Backup.
For more information about the application scenarios of Cloud Backup, see Enterprise-level cloud disaster recovery solution.