Business resilience relies on a robust back-up system for all data, client information and anything that is required to run the business effectively should the worst happen. Everyone hopes that this is planning for the worst-case scenario and they will never be required. In many cases the back-up process is the storage of physical tapes away from the main site.

But what if you can’t access those either. For example, in the current climate where everyone is remote and even access to the back-up location would be deemed non-essential travel.

William, from our own IT team gives an overview of the solution we have implemented:

“We currently conduct all of our backups on physical tapes and, as a result of the current pandemic, changing tapes is problematic.

While it would be possible to reduce the backup frequency (at the expense of reducing resilience) or having someone go into our office to change them (with the inherent risk) we decided to make the planned move to cloud backups sooner than expected.

After some research on different methods and companies providing cloud backups, the most appropriate for our purposes is to use AWS Storage Gateway. This was chosen for multiple reasons:

• it’s relatively easy to setup; and
• the AWS Storage Gateway integrates with our current backup software significantly reducing the migration effort with no need to re-create our backup plans and scheduled jobs

With the AWS gateway in place, it provides several benefits:

• removing any need for someone to physically change tapes as it performed remotely through AWS Storage Gateway with the use of “Virtual Backup Tapes”
• allows backup of all our data on to the cloud, yielding secure, reliable, low cost, long term storage – perfect for archival purposes.
• Our backups are available anywhere in the world and stored redundantly across multiple AWS data centres eliminating the need to manually transport server tapes to an off-site location.

If anyone is looking to move to a virtual back-up environment, we would recommend considering a similar process.