Hybrid Cloud, one of the buzzwords of the last decade, is now present in a large majority of organizations, giving an extra layer of complexity in terms of management, risk evaluation, and governance.

A key challenge is the backup and recovery of Hybrid Cloud, ensuring the protection of the on-premise, but also potentially taking care of the SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS which, all have a different level of maturity in this specific domain.

Let’s describe what is a Hybrid Cloud. A common understanding would be the IT environment where applications are running on different types of infrastructure. Basically, on two types, On-premise and Cloud. This is equivalent to private cloud and public cloud.

What are the three steps to ensure robust protection of Hybrid Cloud?

STEP 1: Ensure you know yourself

The first priority is to establish a correct inventory of your IT assets and related links to business applications. Basically, mastering its own IT is already a challenge for a lot of companies, adding cloud elements, even going to Hybrid, things get even more complex.

To achieve the right level of control, you will have to master what are the workloads, where they are running, who owns them, what is the related business, what is the criticality, which components are used, and what is the connection between elements, ...

Once your application and IT cartography are under control, it’s time to integrate security and governance elements and define your RTO and RPO in relation to the different risks you want to cover, both for on-premise AND cloud workload.

Do not forget to integrate all kinds of modern risks such as Cyber Threats.

STEP 2: Assess your cloud provider

The typical misbelief is to consider that the protection (backup) is mature built-in or included in the Cloud contract. Yes, but... each and every cloud provider comes with its own embedded protection, which offers a different level of resistance and capabilities, usually the result of its own history and initial concepts. SaaS solution is built for availability, not for DATA availability. The nuance is important. Cloud is standardized by nature, without any understanding of your needs.

Therefore, based on the output of STEP 1, identify which of your applications are running on-prem and cloud-based, and challenge your provider until you have sufficient elements for your criteria and needs.

Then you will know, if the proposed protection is sufficient for your needs, or not ….

STEP 3: Select the right solution

Once you completed STEPS 1 & 2, you are almost done and ready to evaluate the available solutions on the market to protect your Hybrid Cloud.

Two concepts are present on the market, Cloud, and On-premise:

- SaaS backup solutions are offering rapid and efficient out-of-the-box tooling to offer you the protection of cloud workloads, but also on-premise workloads.

- The on-premise solutions, sometimes called legacy, extend their local capabilities to integrate with the different public cloud solutions.

As always, the devil is in the detail, and this rule is applicable for the two types. Asking the right questions with an adequate when level of granularity is the way to discover the limit of the two approaches.

It’s not a question of being good or bad, but a question of finding the right tool for your needs and your strategy.

Anidris is your trusted advisor in this journey to Hybrid protection. Through our 12 individual experts, we cumulated more than 120 years of experience in backup technique and architecture. This brings us the maturity to have a customer-centric and constructor agnostic approach to always bring you the best solution for your specific needs in this area.