**5.2 Backup and recovery**

A backup is an additional copy of production data, created and retained for the sole purpose of recovering the lost or corrupted data. With the growing business and the regulatory demands for data storage, retention, and availability, cloud service providers face the task of backing up an ever-increasing amount of data. This task becomes more challenging with the growth of data, reduced IT budgets, and less time available for taking backups. Moreover, service providers need fast backup and recovery of data to meet their service level agreements. The amount of data loss and downtime that a business can endure in terms of RPO and RTO are the primary considerations in selecting and implementing a specific backup strategy. RPO specifies the time interval between two backups. For example, if a service requires an RPO of 24 hours, the data need to be backed up every 24 hours. RTO relates to the time taken by the recovery process. To meet the defined RTO, the service provider should choose the appropriate backup media or backup target to minimize the recovery time. For example, a restore from tapes takes longer to complete than a restore from disks. Service providers need to evaluate the various backup methods along with their recovery considerations and retention requirements to implement a successful backup and recovery solution in a cloud environment.
