Business continuity and security are top priorities for IT professionals. Along with data protection tools, data backup plays an important role in keeping an organization running. There is no shortage of tools and methods for backup and restore, but the glut of options can make choosing the most efficient and effective set of backup operations difficult.

Cloud technology has enjoyed exponential growth over the past several years. Increases in broadband and wireless speeds have spurred a rise in everything from cloud storage to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Before the cloud grew into its current form, it was primarily a tool for backing up data in a safe, remote location. Throughout the evolution of cloud, backup and restore remains one of this technology’s most widely-used and important functions.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses, and protecting it is incredibly important. One of the ways DBAs help ensure the continuous availability of data is through database backups, a process involving copying the data and schema from a database and saving them elsewhere for retrieval later. But like any other process in IT, database backups have costs, benefits, and risks associated with them.

The state of backup technology has moved forward, and many of the old assumptions are no longer true. For years, image-based backup was considered the industry standard. But today’s IT professionals really need full-system recovery capabilities without the built-in inefficiencies of legacy image backup products. Image-based backup backups are far from ideal, especially for managed services providers (MSPs).

In SRE, we believe that some failure is inevitable. Complex systems receiving updates will eventually experience incidents that you can’t anticipate. What you can do is be ready to mitigate the damage of these incidents as much as possible. One facet of disaster readiness is incident response - setting up procedures to solve the incident and restore service as quickly as possible. Another strategy involves reducing the chances for failure with tactics like reducing single points of failure.