Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) is a unified platform that is developed by Alibaba Cloud for backup and disaster recovery (BDR). HBR provides features such as data backup, disaster recovery, and policy-based archive management.

Necessity of BDR

BDR is an important method for enterprises to protect core business data against ransomware, system failures, natural disasters, and O&M accidents that cause data loss and damage. BDR helps enterprises meet data security and compliance requirements in various industries.

  • Data risks

    Ransomware, system failures, natural disasters, and O&M accidents have huge negative impact on business data. This may lead to unexpected data loss and damage.

  • Data security and compliance requirements

    The following information security regulations clearly state that data integrity, confidentiality, and availability shall be maintained: Multi-level Protection Scheme (MLPS) 2.0, Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), and Regulation on Protecting the Security of Critical Information.

    In 2020, a core employee of a company deleted a database without authorization. The event disrupted the SaaS business of the company. The company lost over one billion Hong Kong dollar of market value. Millions of merchants suffered temporary business suspension.

    In 2020, a cyber attacker demanded a ransom of CNY 230 million after the attacker encrypted 30 TB of data stored on the core server of a factory by using ransomware.

Advantages of HBR cloud disaster recovery

HBR cloud disaster recovery has the following advantages over traditional data centers in terms of cost, deployment efficiency, and O&M.

Item Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) Traditional data centers
Cost of ownership You are billed for using HBR resources based on the pay-as-you-go billing method. This reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO). You need to procure both software and hardware. Upfront costs are high.
Deployment efficiency HBR is an out-of-the box cloud service. You can deploy the service within only one day. Several months or years are required to build a data center.
O&M High scalability, high reliability, and maintenance-free. Complex O&M and high workloads.
Robustness Geo-redundancy offers additional protection. You can enable the feature with one click. Data loss may occur in regional natural disasters.
Recovery drill You can perform recovery drills based on your business requirements without affecting production. A long period of time is required to prepare for a recovery drill.

Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) advantages

  • Technical advantages

    HBR can identify and delete duplicate data with high accuracy and efficiency.

    technical advantage
    Item Description
    Features HBR accurately identifies duplicate data in lengthened data slices and uploads and backs up only the incremental data segments of the data slices. If a data segment already exists in the backup vault, HBR does not upload the data segment to the backup vault again.
    Advantages HBR can duplicate and compress data with high efficiency. The deduplication and compression ratio can reach up to 30:1. In some scenarios, a backup service without the deduplication feature requires 30 times more storage usage than HBR.
    Benefits HBR reduces your backup and storage costs. You can retain your previous backups for a long period of time with an affordable budget. In hybrid cloud scenarios, data is deduplicated at the backup source. This can reduce the bandwidth that is consumed to migrate your business.
  • O&M advantages

    Automatic backup and monitoring are supported.

    O&M advantage
    Item Description
    Features You can configure policies of full backup, incremental backup, log backup, and real-time backup as needed. You can receive alert notifications from multiple channels such as SMS messages and emails. You can also view the details about historical backup jobs and error log reports in the HBR console.
    Advantages You need to configure backup policies only once before the backup process is fully managed by HBR. HBR monitors end-to-end backup jobs and sends alert notifications if errors occur.
    Benefits You do not need to perform O&M. This helps you optimize labor costs. HBR fully manages data backup to ensure data security.
  • User experience advantages

    HBR provides a user-friendly GUI. In the HBR console, you can view the list of backup plans, disaster recovery records, and recovery points. You can also start disaster recovery drill with one click.

    Item Description
    Features Interfaces for scenarios such as file backup, database backup, and ECS disaster recovery are specifically designed. Step-by-step guidance is provided for backup and disaster recovery.
    Advantages Backup plans, backup points, and recovery points are clearly displayed in the HBR console. This simplifies disaster recovery.
    Benefits The features provided in the HBR console are easy to learn and use. This minimizes the effect of a turnover of O&M staff.
  • Security advantages

    HBR provides the immutable backup feature that can improve the security management of your data backup. This feature protects your data against unexpected operations, malicious attacks, and unauthorized backup or restoration and helps meet data security and compliance requirements. HBR allows you to encrypt your data based on Key Management Service (KMS), enable the immutable backup feature, and isolate backup permissions from recovery permissions. For more information, see Enable the security enhancement feature for backup management.

    Item Description
    Features
    • KMS encryption
    • Immutable backup
    • Isolation of backup permissions from recovery permissions
    Advantages You can enable KMS encryption and the immutable backup feature in the HBR console with only one click.
    Benefits You can enable the security enhancement features of HBR to improve the security management of your data backup. These features can protect your data against unexpected operations, malicious attacks, and unauthorized backup or restoration to meet your data security and compliance requirements.

The following table describes the advantages of Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) over an on-premises backup system in a self-managed data center or on the cloud.

Item On-premises backup system HBR
Permission management Not supported.

No strict permission management is available. Therefore, misoperations such as accidental data deletion may occur.

Supported.

HBR uses Resource Access Management (RAM) to grant different permissions to different roles and allow each role to access only authorized resources.

Deduplication and compression Not supported.

Duplicate backup data increases storage costs and lowers the backup speed.

Supported.

HBR uses deduplication and compression technologies that are developed by Alibaba Cloud. This can effectively reduce the amount of transmitted data and storage usage, increase the backup speed, and reduce costs.

Backup alerting Not supported.

If a backup failure occurs, you must manually track the backup process to identify the failure cause. Otherwise, you may find the backup failure only when you attempt to restore data from the backup.

Supported.

HBR provides the backup alerting feature. You can use this feature to send alert notifications to specified contacts if a backup fails or a client is disconnected from a server.

Lifecycle management You must manually manage the lifecycle of backup data. HBR automatically manages the lifecycle of backup data.
Remote backup Not supported. HBR allows you to create a remote mirror vault for a backup vault. You can use a mirror vault to back up or restore data across regions. For more information, see Back up data across regions.
Data restoration You must manually restore data from multiple data replicas. HBR provides backup versions for you to choose when you attempt to restore data. You can also set restore rules.
Management costs High.

You must compile scripts to back up data and dispatch dedicated engineers to manage backups. The complex and difficult O&M reduce resource utilization and increase management costs.

Low.

HBR manages your backup data in cloud vaults. You do not need to worry about backup management issues, such as hardware procurement, configuration, cluster scaling, and security.

Data encryption You must build a system to encrypt data. HBR uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit algorithm or Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt and transmit data from a backup source and store the backup data in the cloud. During data transmission, HBR also uses HTTPS to encrypt data. For more information, see Enable the security enhancement feature for backup management.
Immutable backup Not supported. The immutable backup feature supports the Write Once Read Many (WORM) policy. If you enable this feature, you can write data to all backup vaults only once and read data from the backup vaults multiple times. The feature provides additional protection for your backup vault. For more information, see Enable the security enhancement feature for backup management.
High availability of data You must manually manage the availability of backup data. HBR provides the multi-copy redundancy technology and supports zone-redundancy of backup vaults. For more information, see Backup vault for zone-redundant storage (ZRS).