1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Security Policies and Standards
Maine’s Office of Information Technology
Massachusetts Security Policy & Standards

6. 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:

7. 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: $ $0.025/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)

8. 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

9. 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. ) versus full data restore
Tier your applications into appropriate RPO/RTO pairs and plan accordingly

10. 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

11. 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!

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

13. 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

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

15. 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

16. 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!

17. 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

18. 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!

19. 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

20. Backups The Amazon Way
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

21. 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

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