Google Cloud is improving its Backup and Disaster Recovery service with three new preview features for simplifying backup management and policies.
First, backup vault provides immutable and indelible backups, meaning they are both prevented from having modifications made to them and cannot be deleted. This protects backups from being tampered with or being unintentionally deleted.
“Backups often represent the last resort for recovery when production data becomes unavailable or untrusted, such as in the aftermath of a cyber attack or catastrophic user error. It’s critical to not only back up your critical workloads, but also to secure those backups against subsequent modification and deletion,” Jerome McFarland and Jaswant Chajed, product managers at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.
Backup vaults are stored in Google-managed projects and are air-gapped from your other Google Cloud projects, which means that the resources are not visible or accessible to other users within your organization. Backup data can also only be accessed through the Google Cloud Backup and DR service APIs and UI, Google Cloud explained.
Users can set a minimum retention timeframe, during which modifications and deletions cannot be made. Backup vaults can also be created in a different project than the source project, so that if the source project is removed or unavailable, the backup is unaffected.
According to Google Cloud, backup vault works with Compute Engine VMs, VMware Engine VMs, Oracle databases, and SQL Server databases.
The company also announced centralized backup management, which is a fully managed end-to-end solution for managing backups. It allows developers to back up their VMs and still enable the central backup team to have governance and oversight into those VMs.
“Our new centralized backup management experience offers simplicity through a fully managed service that makes data protection straightforward, and delivers an integrated, developer-centric, self-service model for app developers,” McFarland and Chajed wrote.
And finally, Google Cloud announced a new integration within the Compute Engine VM creation experience that allows application owners to create and apply backup policies when they create a VM in a user-friendly manner. According to the company, incorporating backup policy creation into the VM creation process results in policies being consistently applied from the start.
“By combining immutability, indelibility, centralized governance, and user empowerment, we’re providing a comprehensive backup strategy that protects your critical data against today’s evolving threats,” McFarland and Chajed concluded.
