The definitive guideto enterprise data backup
and recovery architectures
Comparing on-premises, hybrid, hosted,
and cloud-native solutions

From legacy tocloud data protection
The evolution of modern data protection strategies
The all-encompassing data center is a thing of the past. Modern data environments are distributed andinclude remote and branch offices, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) as well as cloudsolutions such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service(SaaS). There is more critical data to back up than ever before. Plus, data silos and fragmented management
mean poor visibility, which can make it difficult to comply with regional data residency and security rules
as well as service-level agreements (SLAs).
On-premises data protection has not kept pace. According to a survey by Fujitsu, 45 percent of IT managers
said they had lost data or productivity related to data protection inefficiency within the previous year.1
Often, this is because on-premises backups are cumbersome and do not always happen on time.

1

https://go.druva.com/rs/307-ANG-704/images/451_DisasterRecovery_DataBackup_RM.pdf

Businesses are moving
data protection to the cloudA growing number of businesses are thinking about moving data protection tothe cloud, because it promises to be:• Less expensive. With cloud services, you eliminate hardware installation and maintenance costs. You don’t
have to build and manage a data center. When you back up all of your data to the cloud, you only pay for thecapacity you use, thereby minimizing storage costs and overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
• More scalable. You can add or subtract capacity to support large and rapidly changing workloads
virtually instantaneously.
• Easier to manage and maintain. Data unification—storing all of your backup data in the cloud—makes it
easier to know exactly what data you have and manage it from a single control panel rather than multiple,incompatible tools. Plus, IT often doesn’t have to manage routine software patches and updates fordata protection infrastructure.
• Highly flexible. Cloud providers are increasingly adopting open standards, which means greater flexibility
and more applications to choose from.
• More reliable (and less risky). Cloud providers are more likely to meet their SLAs for recovery time and recovery
point objectives (RTO and RPO) when restoring business-critical data, and therefore ensure business continuity.
Today, there are many data protection architectures to choose from. This paper will compare on-premises
data protection with hybrid, hosted, and cloud-native options and help you determine which one is right for you.

The problem with
on-premises data protection
Although a growing number of businesses are adopting or considering dataprotection in the cloud, most still depend on on-premises backup and recovery.
In an ESG survey, 49 percent of businesses said they still rely on tape as their primary
form of direct backup.2 Why is this a problem? Downsides of on-premises
backup and recovery include:
High costs

Poor scalability

Data loss

Non-compliance

Maintaining and upgrading
traditional backup solutions
can be very expensive. Tape
backups in particular canabsorb significant IT resourcesand generate escalating
maintenance costs.

On-premises data protection
is difficult to scale as yourbusiness grows. Whendata growth outstrips thecapabilities of your dataprotection system, backups
may be late or simply nothappen. An ESG survey ofalmost 400 IT and storage
managers at midmarket
companies revealed that
only 70 percent of backup jobs
are completed on time.3

When backups are late or
incomplete—which is often
the case with on-premises
data protection during
periods of rapid businessgrowth—recovery fromevents such as outages or
ransomware attacks canbe compromised.

Traditional backup solutions
that store regional data incentralized hubs may notcomply with evolving data
privacy regulations andcan present significant
legal risks.

2

https://www.lto.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ESG-WP-LTO-EVV-Feb_2016.pdf

3https://go.druva.com/rs/307-ANG-704/images/ESG-Solution-Showcase-Druva-April-2017.pdf

Is the cloud secure enoughfor data protection?
Just a couple of years ago, the public cloud was considered too dangerous andunreliable for storing sensitive company data. A lot has changed since then, including:
Improved physicalsecurity
Maintaining and upgrading
traditional backup solutions
can be very expensive. Tapebackups in particular canabsorb significant IT resources and generate escalating
maintenance costs.

4

http://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/books/cloud/cloud_strategy_leadership.pdf

Continuous monitoring

Frequent security audits

Automated, 24/7 security
monitoring allows cloudservice providers to identify
potential issues long before
they impact customer data.
Through 2020, Gartner
predicts public cloud IaaS
workloads will suffer at least
60 percent fewer security incidents than those in traditional
data centers.4

Cloud service providers conduct frequent security audits
to ensure they’re using thelatest best practices.

New compliancemeasuresCloud service providers haveintroduced local archiving
and thoughtful storage
policies for full compliancewith regional data privacy
and security rules.

Popular dataprotection
architectures

What approach(es) are you using to backup your data?
66%

On-premises architectures are stillcommonly used for data protection.

50%
42%
39%

While enterprises are moving some of theirdata to the cloud and actively considering thecloud for data protection, most still rely on someform of on-premises architecture, especially for
mission-critical data. According to a study
commissioned by Forrester, most businesses
use multiple approaches to data protection,
including on-premises architectures as well as

30%

32%

31%

30%

31%

29%

26%

22%

hybrid, hosted, and native cloud.5
Mission-critical data
On-premises
5

Business-critical data
HybridHosted Solution

Non-critical data
Backup-as-a-service

Base: variable; IT professionals at organizations in the US and Canada
Source: a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Druva, November 2017

A brief overview of the most popular solutions
for enterprise data protection

On-premises

Hybrid cloudHosted cloud

Cloud-native

On-premises data protection
architectures are deeply entrenchedin many organizations. Although thismodel lacks scalability, some ITteams may believe on-premises dataprotection gives them more control
over critical data and minimizes
security risks.

A hybrid cloud data protection strategy
relies on on-premises infrastructureand software for recent backups anduses the cloud for long-term archiving.
Hybrid solutions may include data
replication and tape backups. TCO may
be better than traditional, on-premises
data protection, but it is hard to scale,may take months to build, and can becomplex in a way that makes achieving
visibility into global data more difficult.
This kind of cloud offers IT more control,
but also requires active IT involvement
at all phases of development.

Hosted cloud is traditional on-premises
backup software running in the cloudand using warm storage. It offers
greater availability than hybrid cloud,
but it isn’t necessarily optimized for acloud environment; it doesn’t fully
deliver the economies of scale thecloud has to offer. TCO is similar to orslightly better than hybrid cloud, and it
still requires considerable IT oversight.

Cloud-native data protection isoptimized for performance andscalability over the public cloud.
It offers centralized managementof backup and recovery processes,
consistent performance even withpetabytes of data, and lower TCO
than hybrid and hosted solutions.
It also scales quickly. IT has muchless day-to-day involvement thanwith hybrid and hosted models.

Comparing data protection architectures
Cloud-native data protection offers much lower TCO, greater resiliency, and more features than competing architectures.

On-premises

HybridHostedCloud-native

Resilience/Durability

99%

99.5%

99.99%

99.99999%

Availability

99%99%

99.5%

99.95%

MonthsMonthsDaysDaysHighMidMid

Low

Replication/tapes

Replication/tapes

Limited replication

3-way replication

Disk/tapes

Disk/cold storage

Disk/cold storage

Object/cold storage

LANLAN + WAN

WAN(Restricted bandwidth)

WAN(Unrestricted bandwidth)

Scalability

On-request

On-request

On-request

Scale-out (unlimited)

RTO/RPO

HighHighLow

High (cache/disaster recovery)

On-request

On-request

On-request

On-demand

Time to market
Total cost of ownership
Offsite options
Retention options
Network throughput

Global reach(new data centers)

How fast is
fast enough?
Can cloud data protection meet your RTOs?
When an event happens that takes your business offline, time is money.
You want to recover your data as quickly as possible and if the problem
system can’t be recovered, data must be restored from backup. A recovery
time objective (RTO) is how long you have to restore data from backup
without incurring business consequences. Your ideal RTOs may bedifferent for different applications and lines of business.

RTO comparison for active-system recovery
On-premisesHybrid

HostedCloud-native

Endpoints

20 minutes

20 minutes

5 minutes

5 minutes

Remote offices

30 minutes

30 minutes

20 minutes

20 minutes

Small DC (100TB+)

30 minutes

30 minutes

1 hour

1 hourLarge DC (100TB+)

30 minutes

30 minutes

1 hour

1 hourCloud applications

N/AN/A

1 hour

1 hour

The ABCs of RTOs in the cloud
RTO is a common metric in data protection SLAs, both internal and external.
Yet recovery jobs often fail to meet RTO SLAs. In many cases, cloud data

RTO comparison for archive recovery

protection—especially hosted and cloud-native solutions—can offer greater

On-premises

HybridHostedCloud-native

Remote offices

Days

Days

4-8 hours

4-8 hours

Small DC (100TB+)

Days

Days

4-8 hours

4-8 hours

coverage for both on-premises and cloud applications. Hosted and cloud-native

Large DC (100TB+)

Days

Days

4-8 hours

4-8 hours

models also offer extremely fast RTO for endpoints and remote offices.

Cloud applications

Days

Days

4-8 hours

4-8 hours

reliability as well as significantly better RTOs than on-premises solutions for:• Active-system recovery. Most backup and recovery architectures can supportactive-system recovery, but hybrid, hosted and cloud-native solutions offer• Archive recovery (cold data > 1 year). On-premises and hybrid cloud solutions
that rely on tape backups are significantly slower than hosted and cloud-nativesolutions that use cold storage.

Hosted cloud vs. cloud-native
What’s the difference ?
Both hosted and cloud-native data protection
services are typically delivered as SaaS.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell thedifference between the two because buzzwords
like “cloud-enabled” are often used to describe abroad spectrum of cloud frameworks.
Generally speaking, hosted cloud solutions
repurpose traditional data protection software byrunning it in the cloud. Cloud-native solutions rely
on software designed specifically for the cloud.

HostedCloud-native

A hosted solution is limited by theA cloud-native solution utilizes the full

on-premises software it uses.

capability of the cloud.

• Uses traditional software in the cloud• Uses software designed to take full

• Doesn’t completely leverage cloud-nativetechnologies for scale and efficiency• Expensive to build and manage• Limited search or disaster recovery
capabilities• Single-tenant, manual updates

advantage of the cloud• Leverages cloud-native technologies
for scale and efficiency• Lower cost and effort• Higher value of data with integrated
disaster recovery, archival, search, andanalytics• Multi-tenant, automatic updates

Find the rightcloud dataprotection
strategy
Ultimately, the best data protection
for your business is the one that meets
your requirements.

When you’re talking to solution providers, these questions can help you see
beyond the “cloud” buzzwords and identify which solutions will work best for you:
• How much data will be stored given your current data protection footprint, and how much will it cost?
• How much more will you pay if you need to support more data? How do costs go downwhen data is purged?
• What is the archiving model? How is data moved from warm to cold storage?
What are the associated costs?
• How quickly does the system scale when you need more capacity?
• What about management across multiple regions?
• Does your solution use block or object-based storage? If block, how does it provide replication andresiliency, and how does it scale as capacity increases?

The first step to moving some or all of yourdata protection to the cloud is understanding
your RTO and RPO needs for mission-critical,
business-critical, and non-critical data.
Once you’ve defined your requirements,
it’s time to research cloud data protection
and management solution providers.

• How does your solution handle bandwidth constraints?

It’s better in the cloudThe value of cloud-native data protection• Improved reliability and recoverability of backups. This is no surprise, as mostcloud data protection models—and cloud-native in particular—are built to meetaggressive SLAs.
• Increased security. A growing number of businesses are recognizing that dataprotection in the cloud is actually more secure than on-premises data protection.
• Reduced IT personnel costs. Cloud data protection—especially hosted andcloud-native—requires much less IT involvement than on-premises protection.
• Reduced or eliminated on-site data protection hardware infrastructure costs.
For midmarket and larger companies, this savings can be substantial, freeing up
resources for innovation.
• Reduced complexity within an IT environment. Legacy, on-premises data protection systems can becomplex and time-consuming to maintain. Cloud data protection can help streamline IT infrastructure overall.
• Greater manageability and compliance. If all backup data is stored in the cloud (e.g., data unification),businesses can manage that data from a single dashboard and more easily comply with data residency andother rules as well as SLAs.

Druva: cloud-native dataprotection and management
Enterprise cloud backup with integrated disaster recovery and archival
Druva solutions, built on AWS, deliver data protection and governance for all enterprise infrastructuresfrom mobile endpoints to VMs and cloud workloads. Druva offers high-performance, scalable backup,DR, archival, and analytics to simplify data protection, improve visibility, and dramatically reduce the risk,
cost, and effort of managing today’s complex information environments.
Key features include:• Offsite infrastructure. It automatically protects data without the need for expensive on-site hardware andadministrative overhead.
• Improved business agility. Response times for failover are nearly instantaneous with RTOs measured in minutes.
Likewise, it can seamlessly replicate and move VMs across regions.
• Workload mobility. It supports workload mobility, which brings data protection to local applications and addresses
their testing and development requirements.
• Simplified management. It provides a single dashboard for managing all of your server backup and DR policies,
so you don’t have to rely on multiple storage, compute, and network management tools.
• Low TCO. Its pay-per-use model means you pay only for what you consume. Because it performs backups,
DR, archiving, and analytics on a single, unified data set, you also avoid the costs associated withmanaging multiple data silos.

Discover how Druva
delivers a SaaS-based
platform to protect andmanage enterprisedata across endpoint,
data center, and cloud
workloads.

About Druva
Druva™ delivers data protection and management for the cloud era. Druva
Cloud Platform is built on AWS and offered as-a-Service; customers drive
down costs by up to 50 percent by freeing themselves from the burden of
unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management. Druva
is trusted worldwide by over 4,000 companies at the forefront of embracing
cloud. Druva is a privately held company headquartered in Sunnyvale,
California and is funded by Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, Riverwood Capitaland Nexus Partners. Visit Druva and follow us @druvainc.

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