Uptime All The Time: Doing Business In The Cloud Municipal Technology Conference 11 May 2017 L. Mark Stone – General Manager, Managed and Private/Hybrid Cloud Services

Agenda Maine Security Policies and Standards Cloud Storage Pricing Is Cloud Secure? RPO/RTO – It’s Only Restores That Matter Cloud Backup Strategies – Which Layer(s)? Data, Volume, Application, VM The Amazon Way Q & A

Biography New York City 13 years technology and media M&A 6 years of line operating experience CIO for global corporate trading company Directed $1.2B in corporate procurement 19 offices in 16 countries $5M agile software development Responsible for global infrastructure

Biography Moved to Maine Current Status: ~ 60 Clients 2003: Founded Reliable Networks 2014: Acquired by OTT Communications Current Status: ~ 60 Clients Most in New England; rest across the U.S. Managed Services (On- and Off-Premises), Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, Microsoft, Zimbra, Private/Hybrid Cloud Hosting

Security Policies and Standards Maine’s Office of Information Technology http://www.maine.gov/oit/security/ Massachusetts Security Policy & Standards http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/cyber-security/security-for-state-employees/security-policies-and-standards/

Security Policies and Standards #1 Rule for Newbies: “Encryption in Flight; Encryption at Rest” Don’t use deprecated ciphers! Using web services? Check a web site at: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Storage Pricing On-Premises SAN (You Need 2!): $1/GB each Maine OIT: $1.42/GB/Month Reliable Networks: $0.12/GB/Month Amazon Web Services: EBS: $0.125 - $0.025/GB/Month (Provisioned) EBS Snapshots to S3: $0.05/GB/Month (Used) S3 Standard: $0.023/GB/Month (Used) Glacier: $0.01/GB/Month (Used)

Is Cloud Secure? Yes, but it’s up to you. No different than on-premises, really Only the tools and methods change Cloud Newbies’ #1 concern is Security For Experienced User’s: Compliance https://www.rightscale.com/lp/state-of-the-cloud

RPO and RTO Recovery Point Objective Recovery Time Objective How much data, in time, can I afford to lose? Recovery Time Objective For how long can I afford to be down? Functionality with new data (e.g. email) versus full data restore Tier your applications into appropriate RPO/RTO pairs and plan accordingly

Use Cases To Consider Data Corruption; accidental destruction System still fully functional Single Server Hardware failure Virtualization provides full recovery in minutes SAN Hardware failure Virtualization with replicated SANs provides full recovery in minutes

Use Cases To Consider Data center offline Hit by meteor or other total physical loss Extended power/cooling/connectivity outage Key Takeaway: Backups are not a Disaster Recovery Strategy! No one cares about backups; Restores are what really matter!

Cloud Backup Strategies – Data File Level Backups Periodically copy files offsite: Robocopy rsync CDP appliance S3 connector Tape is fast becoming deprecated

Cloud Backup Strategies – Data Advantages: Virtually no dependency on hardware or software You can restore and read an Excel spreadsheet anywhere Disadvantages: Backups may not be complete

Cloud Backup Strategies – Volume Snapshots copied offsite Storage Level: SAN Replication Hypervisor Level: Volume Snaps Careful of RPO requirements Linux LVM Snapshots Commercial products

Cloud Backup Strategies – Volume Advantages: No risk of “overlooked” data Disadvantages: Windows: Not all apps are VSC aware Linux: In-memory data not backed up Can lead to database corruption

Cloud Backup Strategies – Application e.g. SQL Server Backups The application manages its own backups Restores often don’t work across different application versions Keep license keys separate!

Cloud Backup Strategies – Application Advantages: The software vendor can help with restores Disadvantages: RTO can be long when there is a physical loss, if you haven’t properly accounted for a replacement server and application install – needed before you can restore the application data

Cloud Backup Strategies – VM Every hypervisor has the capability to backup/snapshot entire virtual machines Commercial products can simplify restores, but each has limitations Beware of “crash-consistent” backups!

Cloud Backup Strategies – VM Advantages: Really nice for archival point-in-time backups; you can fire up a copy of the December 31, 2015 virtual server typically in a few minutes Disadvantages: Some third-party software licensing doesn’t work on aged rebooted servers (unless you hack time) Requires complex isolated networks if software “phones home” for license checking purposes

Backups The Amazon Way https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Storage/Backup_and_Recovery_Approaches_Using_AWS.pdf Can do all four methods Don’t need to host your VMs on AWS Restoring to any Cloud provider is faster and cheaper than restoring on-premises

Closing Recap Security first; functionality second Tier your applications and data into RPO/RTO pairs to better manage expectations and budgets Choose the right Cloud backup method (file, volume, application or VM) based on the asset and the RPO/RTO requirements Backups are not a Disaster Recovery strategy

Thanks! L. Mark Stone (207) 772-5678 mark.stone@reliablenetworks.com Q & A Thanks! L. Mark Stone (207) 772-5678 mark.stone@reliablenetworks.com