With the territory of cloud computing, comes the critical need for a robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) mechanism for securing the cloud environment. Google Cloud Platform’s Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution, Actifio Go, offers data protection that allows you to achieve real-time visibility and control, and works across hybrid as well as GCP environments.
Actifio Go is a backup and disaster recovery service platform available on Google Cloud that enables you to gain end-to-end visibility, control and security. Here, we unpack the value of Actifio Go for integrated cloud data protection.
The need for backup and disaster recovery solutions
The cloud is here to stay, and being truly prepared in the event of a disaster is essential for survival. While there are many benefits to moving to the cloud, the chances of a disaster or threat remains no matter how thoroughly a strategy is made. Cloud outages can be caused by issues with the network, or by issues with the infrastructure itself. From malicious agents causing these outages to a technical malfunction, anything can happen for a cloud outage to be triggered. Protecting your data is a crucial step in gaining control over your cloud assets. Recovering from an outage has to be quick, but thorough. For any backup and DR system to be effective, it is imperative to reduce the Recovery Time Objective (RTO- the maximum time period a system can take to recover) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO – the maximum amount of data loss the organization can take).
There are multiple challenges to securing data. These include –
- High costs and complexity when managing multiple on-premises solutions for backup and disaster recovery
- Need for cost effective data retention while minimizing costs and maintaining data access
- Minimizing RPO on databases
- Cumbersome lifecycle management for backup data
- Complexity in architecture of virtual dedupe appliances, backup servers and media servers
Actifio Go solves these operational challenges for a simpler and more comprehensive data fortification solution.
GCP backup and disaster recovery best practices
The cloud remains one of the best practices for a solid backup and disaster recovery strategy. The cloud can be a powerful ally when it comes to disaster recovery. You can backup files or even maintain complete replicas in the cloud, so that if something happens you can transition operations to remote resources quickly and easily. Cloud DR usually costs less and is more reliable than relying on company-owned resources, making it a great option for anyone looking to improve their disaster recovery plan.
Partner solutions offer robust and thorough backup and disaster recovery offerings via GCP’s broad partner ecosystem that can be built on/integrated with Google Cloud. This brings freedom of choice and frictionless use of third-party products and services.
Google Cloud products and services themselves are inherently built with data protection as a priority, offering a broad range of data security features such as backup for GKE, Persistent Disk snapshots, geo-redundant cloud storage and more.
Features of Actifio Go
Actifio Go works for Google workloads such as Google Compute Engine and Google VMware Engine, and for hybrid workloads such as VMware, SAP HANA, Oracle and SQL Server, and others, adding value for both GCP and on-prem users.
It helps you minimize your risk of data loss, and maximize your services with highly efficient incremental forever backup to Google Cloud
It functions as a database and VM recovery tool for Test Data Management (TDM), and ransomware recovery. Actifio captures snapshots of disks attached to the VMs and stores it in Object Storage. And on disaster recovery, these snapshots are used to recover the virtual machine or the database
It also enables backup data analysis with BigQuery for deep organizational insight
It is simple to use with its SaaS model, incorporating all of the required functionalities into one solution
How Actifio benefits businesses
With Actifio, on-prem users can backup their environment on Google Compute Engine. Actifio also provides flexibility and opportunity to use GCVE (where On-Prem users can continue to leverage their expertise and comfort of using VMware on GCP). On-prem users having a defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) , can back up data to Cloud Storage using Actifio, and then run test, failover and failback programs. A new environment using either Google Compute Engine/Google Cloud VMware Engine can then be created where the applications can be restored to this environment from the backup copy stored in cloud storage. This allows businesses to avoid continuously running VMs in Google Cloud Platform to protect on-prem environments, and instead create DR VMware environments on-demand during failover/test time.
It reduces total cost of ownership by minimizing required compute, bandwidth and storage needs, while utilizing Google Cloud storage to further optimize cost on cloud. With Google Nearline/Coldline, Actifio brings data retention that is cost effective for businesses. Actifio also leverages intelligent caching technology, minimizing egress charges and API cost.
Application consistent data capture and recovery brought to life by integrations with SQL Servers and databases. With Actifio, businesses can reduce the time it takes to recover as well as minimize data loss.
Actifio also simplifies management and reduces OpEx with automated software updates
Components of Actifio GO
Actifio Global Manager (AGM) is the management control plane, (automatically deployed when subscribed from marketplace) in Google Cloud to set up backup and recovery files/folders/VMs, in the cloud. It also administers, monitors, and manages the Actifio Sky Data Movers.
An Actifio Sky Data Mover is a VM appliance that protects on-premises workloads, or Google Cloud VMs. It is managed by Sky, the core data mover engine that performs Actifio Go’s functionalities.
With Actifio Go, businesses can gain peace of mind about their data on cloud. If you would like to find out how Niveus can help set up Actifio Go for your organization, please email us at biz@niveussolutions.com
