Dark Site Backup Support with Cloud Backup

Organizations with the strictest security policies can’t allow inbound/outbound network traffic to and from their data centers. This can create serious storage crunch issues, especially when it comes to storing infrequently used backup data. Now NetApp has a solution: dark site backup storage with Cloud Backup.

Cloud Backup’s new software-only option now makes it possible to store backup data in offline and restricted on-prem dark site backup environments.

In this article, we’ll look at how this feature lets Cloud Backup provide all the benefits of automatic, block-level forever backup and restore for users with the strictest security requirements.

How Cloud Backup Dark Site Deployment Works

For many organizations, there is an imperative to keep data protected with the highest level of security standards—simply backing up to the public cloud is not an option. That has made Cloud Backup off limits for these users, since its SaaS-based deployment would automatically update and transmit backup data to object storage in the cloud. With Cloud Backup’s new software-only option, all that has changed.

Cloud Backup now comes with a self-managed, or “software-only” mode. With the software-only option, users have more control to keep data securely stored. The chief feature of the software-only option is that it does not have any outbound internet connectivity. This makes it ideal for customers who want to manage private clouds.

How is the software-only option different from SaaS-based deployment? Whereas Cloud Backup being deployed as a SaaS usually requires outbound communication from the customer’s data center to the SaaS-based UI and other essential endpoints for day-to-day operations, the software-only option does not.

With the software-only option:

• All packages, dependencies and essential components are packed as a software and served from the local machine.
• Instead of updating automatically, Cloud Backup is updated via an installer, like a traditional software product.
• Your backup storage is kept locally in the data center without consuming any resources over the internet.

This can allow you to create a fully functional on-prem dark site backup environment for you to securely store your backup data.

How NetApp Cloud Backup Benefits Dark Site Users

NetApp Cloud Backup is a block-level, incremental-forever backup and restore service for data stored on on-premises ONTAP clusters or on Cloud Volumes. It now supports storing these backups offline with the software-only option.

Until now, ONTAP users looking for this level of protection for their backup data have had to rely on other backup solutions. However, these solutions could only provide inefficient, file-level backups—a type of backup which can take so long to create that entire backup windows could be missed. These users also didn’t have a way to preserve their existing ONTAP storage efficiencies, meaning their backup storage consumption was larger than their primary data set and time consuming to update.

Cloud Backup’s dark site support and software-only option allow ONTAP customers from government and other highly regulated sectors to host their critical back up data on appliances without internet connectivity, gaining access to all of Cloud Backup’s benefits:

• Block-level, incremental forever backups: Backup data updates incrementally forever, unlike other solutions that need to create entirely new backups on a frequent basis. This means backups are faster and backup windows don’t get missed.
• Unlimited scalability: Cloud Backup scales up and down seamlessly using object storage to meet dynamic backup capacity needs, such as storing backup archival data.
• Cost-effective: Cloud Backup frees up expensive space in data centers currently taken up by infrequently used backups with large footprints. In addition, Cloud Backup’s in-line storage efficiencies (data deduplication, compression, and compaction), automated storage tiering, and low-footprint incremental backups reduce cloud storage resources and costs to a minimum.
• Extremely fast and reliable backup and restore: With Cloud Backup restores are hassle-free and take minutes rather than hours.Organizations can also rest assured that their recovery procedures will meet the stringent RPO/RTO metrics mandated by regulators. 
• Centralized visibility and management across the entire agency ecosystem: NetApp Cloud Manager extends the familiar and intuitive ONTAP interface to single-pane control of backup environments and processes across even the most complex multicloud and hybrid architectures.

For organizations that need to back up data in cloud or on-premises environments to either public or private clouds, Cloud Backup provides an intuitive, powerful, and simple solution with end-to-end security.

With the new software-only option, you now have the flexibility to consume Cloud Backup either as a self-managed software or as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS). Both models provide you with all the same benefits of automatic, performant, and highly efficient backup and restore.

Try out the new Cloud Backup support for offline dark site deployment with the software-only option. Find out more using the link below: