Alibaba Cloud provides a variety of data protection solutions to implement efficient data backup and disaster recovery. If you select an inappropriate data protection solution, it may not only fail to meet business needs or compliance requirements, but may also result in unnecessary cost increases. This chapter analyzes the backup capabilities, restoration methods, costs, and benefits of different data protection solutions depending on resource types (ECS, OSS, and File Storage NAS), to help you choose a data protection solution that is suitable for your business conditions, enhance business continuity, and meet compliance requirements.
Typical disaster scenarios of enterprises
This chapter compares protection solutions based on data source types and describes the capabilities of these protection solutions against the following disaster scenarios.
Natural disasters: Disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fire, and tsunamis can cause corruption or loss of important data. To protect against such risks, in addition to local backups, we recommend that you replicate data to another data center in a different geographic area to protect data even in a regional disaster.
Ransomware attacks: Ransomware that is included email attachments and malware encrypts user files and demands a ransom to unlock them. To prevent such attacks, enterprises must create local data backups and ensure that the backups are physically isolated from raw data, or that the backups are immutable and unremovable to prevent them from being attacked. If virus detection can be performed on the backups, clean historical backup points can be quickly identified when data restoration is required after the production environment is attacked. This reduces the recovery time objective (RTO).
Accidentally deleted data: Data may be accidentally lost due to program defects, misoperations, or malicious destruction. Enterprises must create local data backups and ensure that different permissions are required for accessing data backups and production data. In addition, data backups must be immutable and unremovable to protect them from being tampered or deleted even in the worst case.
O&M failures: Serious O&M errors also may cause the business system to crash. From the data perspective, in addition to local backups, we recommend that you configure remote backups as an additional measure. When the local environment fails, you can use remote backups to restore data.