I am increasingly encountering a dangerous misconception about data backups that could lead to some serious “facepalm” moments. On at least three separate occassions while speaking with someone about data backups, the person I was with referred to DropBox as their primary data backup platform. In case you are unfamiliar with DropBox, it’s a cloud-based platform that can be used to sync files and folders between multiple computers, while also maintaining a copy of that data in the cloud as well. This cloud component is what many folks like to believe is their “offsite backup”. It’s true – if your local hard drive were to fail and you lost files that were being synced by DropBox, you could retrieve a copy from one of your other mirrors or the copy in the cloud. However, what if you or one of your employees who has access to the DropBox repository accidentally deleted some important files? DropBox doesn’t know you (or they) didn’t mean to delete those files, but it will make sure that change is reflected across your entire DropBox repository. What if you got hit with one of those nasty ransomware viruses which encrypts files, including the files in your DropBox repository? DropBox will dutifully overwrite your data with the encrypted copies, effectively destroying your “offsite backup”.
Let me ‘splain:
DropBox’s strength lies in easily establishing a set of files and folders that can easily be synced across multiple machines and locations, and it does this through a simple mechanism which essentially looks at each endpoint (and the cloud) and says, “Make all these the same.” This same strength is a resounding weakness when it comes to proper backup methodology. In a nutshell, your backups should keep track of your data across time, in set intervals, so that you can, in theory, go back to any one of those points in time and retrieve the data as it was at that moment. The reason this is important is for the two situations mentioned above (and many other scenarios as well). In both cases, mistakes were made. Our best course of action would be to go back in time to before those mistakes were made, but seeing as we can’t actually time travel yet, we use backups to accomplish nearly the same thing with our data. Even if the mistakes weren’t noticed for a period of time, as long as you have sufficient version depth in your backup strategy, you can look back to a time interval before the deletion and retrieve the files. This is something that DropBox can’t do, and probably shouldn’t, as it’s not meant to be a data backup platform. There are hundreds of viable backup solutions that range in price and complexity, and many of them are as easy to set up as DropBox. Don’t stop short of using a real backup solution just because you’ve got a copy of your files somewhere else. A good backup solution requires some thought and determination, but can pay back huge dividends when mistakes or disaster strikes.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In what is being the called the largest migration to cloud services so far, the Department of Veteran Affairs has just inked a deal with Microsoft and HP Enterprise Services to move its 600k users to Microsoft’s cloudbased office productivity suite Office 365. The move is seen by many as further evidence of a significant shift in corporate IT strategy away from costly infrastructure investments to cloud services for every aspect of technology. Over the past 10 years, enterprise IT departments have been gradually, but inexorably moving application platforms out of their own datacenters to providers like Oracle and SAP, but hesitated when it came to the garden-variety desktop applications that knowledge workers use daily. That reluctance may be disintegrating as services from Google and Microsoft make it hard to dismiss the tremendous efficiencies and savings that can be realized by getting rid of the real estate and overhead needed to maintain desktop-based applications.
What this means for you:
Many of you work in the cloud daily without giving it a thought. Perhaps you never thought of Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as a productivity app, but what about Salesforce, or LinkedIn, or even Facebook? Both Google and Microsoft’s cloud-based office apps are full-featured and powerful enough for everyday business tasks, and the very nature of their delivery makes deployment, security and maintenance much simpler that software installed on desktops. It’s this same strength that also proves to be a weakness, as if you lose your internet connection, you also lose your ability to work. Well that’s easy to solve, I can hear you say. Why not just move to another location where the internet is working? What if it’s the cloud itself that is unavailable? Once again, the cardinal rule compartmentalization comes into play – never base the entirety of your critical business operations in the hands of a single, monolithic platform, even if that platform is largely reliable. And this goes doubly so for a platform around whose neck you can’t comfortably get your hands, as is the case with a provider like Microsoft or Google.