**5. Data protection solution: backup**

This section covers an introduction to backup and recovery as well as a review of the backup requirements in a cloud environment. This lesson also covers guest-level and image-level backup methods. Further, this section covers backup as a service, backup service deployment options, and deduplication for backup environment.

#### **5.1 Data protection overview**

Like protecting the infrastructure components (compute, storage, and network), it is also critical for organizations to protect the data by making copies of it so that it is available for restoring the service even if the original data is no longer available. Typically organizations implement data protection solution in order to protect the data from accidentally deleting files, application crashes, data corruption, and disaster. Data should be protected at local location and as well as to a remote location to ensure the availability of service. For example, when a service is failed over to other zone (data center), the data should be available at the destination in order to successfully failover the service to minimize the impact to the service.

One challenge to data protection that remains unchanged is determining the "right" amount of protection required for each data set. A "tiered approach" to data protection takes into account the importance of the data. Individual applications or services and associated data sets have different business values, require different data protection strategies. As a result, a well-executed data protection infrastructure should be implemented by a service provider to offer a choice of cost effective options to meet the various tiers of protection needed. In a tiered approach, data and applications (services) are allocated to categories (tiers) depending on their importance. For example, mission critical services are tier 1, important but less

time-critical services are tier 2, and non-critical services are tier 3. Using tiers, resources and data protection techniques can be applied more cost effectively to meet the more stringent requirements of critical services while less expensive approaches are used for the other tiers. The two key data protection solutions widely implemented are backup and replication.
