Modern Data Protection

Chapter 8. Modern Data Sources

The first chapters were about protecting data sources that very few people would argue about. There are exceptions, of course. Everyone agrees we need to back up servers and databases. Not everyone agrees we should back up laptops, and some people still try to say that some scalable databases are so resilient they don’t need backup. (They’re both wrong.) But with the data sources in this chapter, I constantly find myself arguing with people who either don’t realize they need to be backed up or adamantly say they really don’t need backup.

I can’t state this strongly enough. The cloud is not magic! There is no such thing as the cloud; there is only someone else’s computer. The cloud, SaaS, and (most recently) Kubernetes, do not change the fundamental rules of data protection and data ownership. It’s your data and your responsibility to back it up, and unless you have it in writing that someone else is doing it for you, you have to do it. Even if you have it in writing that they’re doing it for you, it is your job to test that fact.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at these modern and ever-developing workloads. If you’re using them and not backing them up, you can’t say I didn’t tell you.

The Public Cloud

Several large service providers provide compute, storage, networking, and other services to organizations around the world and are referred to as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). These services are giant datacenters that run specialized ...