Often we’re asked when an IT department should shift from direct cloud backup to a hybrid model.
Customers backing up directly to cloud typically have a smaller total backup footprint, smaller backup jobs and a smaller number of jobs. Seagate tracks these criteria as well as the daily rate of change in order to identify those organizations that would seem to be on an accelerated growth path and consequently might benefit from a deployment architecture change.
Compare and Contrast
To give this blog some specific usefulness below we’ve shared some of the indicators we track in our own operation, which may help you to decide it’s time to add a local appliance to aid in meeting recovery time objectives (RTO). To do this gather the following data for your backup and recovery operation:
- Total backup count over the past month, by location;
- Count of restores from the cloud, over the past month, by location;
- Backup and restore size;
- Average usable download bandwidth.
Now, we’ll share some data for you to compare that can be helpful in determining if a change is in order.
As the adjacent chart illustrates, 80% of our cloud customers restore 2 times or less each month to site location. Despite this we see a wide range of monthly restores occurring for the most frequent restorers from the cloud, anywhere from 3 restores in a month to 30 or more. The frequency of restore from the cloud matters because of the time it can take to recover data over the WAN. Size of recovery will matter, of course, as you evaluate whether all of these restores from cloud negatively impact your ability to keep your business running. Based on the chart, would your organization be considered an outlier that would benefit from recovering locally?
Another simple metric we use to evaluate whether an IT group is able to meet standard business objectives is whether the ratio of Average GB Restored to Useable Download Bandwidth is greater than 20GB / 10 Mbps. Frequently, for IT Departments with good WAN bandwidth, job sizes grow to the point that a timely recovery from the cloud isn’t possible in spite of the bandwidth available. Be sure to look at your average restore size and ensure you can recover in the window you desire. We see more and more IT departments driving towards a 4 hour recovery from a local appliance and a 24 recovery from the cloud.
With tens of thousands of cloud customers to compare with, we provide these insights to help you achieve a backup and recovery operation that is best practice for market segments that put a premium on compliance and the ability to recover your data on time, every time.
We’d be interested to learn of your results. Please send any feedback to portalfeedback@seagate.com or you can always reach out to me directly at anne.vincenti
