Making sure your VM backups are secure is a crucial part of safeguarding your system. The possibility that someone might gain unauthorized access to any unencrypted backups leaves your MSP incredibly vulnerable.
To effectively secure your backups, encrypt them both while they’re at rest and while they’re in transit. This ensures the data is encrypted when it’s moving and when it’s in storage. This type of end-to-end encryption reduces vulnerability.
3. Store backups off-site
Having multiple backup copies is a well-known best practice, because it ensures you’ll always have at least one recoverable backup copy of your data. Off-site backup storage offers important protection against things like building fires, floods, or natural disasters. If you store your only backups in the same place as your production data, they won’t help you in these scenarios.
4. Remember that VMware snapshots are not backups
Treating VMware snapshots as backups is, unfortunately, a common mistake. Although snapshots offer a great way of rolling back your environment to a state you know to be error-free, they shouldn’t be used as an alternative to backups.
A snapshot is a delta disk and a memory state file that captures the state of a VM at a specific point in time. The reason a snapshot cannot be used as a backup is because the snapshot disk is dependent on the parent disk and all other earlier snapshot disks in the chain. In other words, if any component in this disk chain gets corrupted, the whole chain is corrupted. Snapshots are stored alongside standard VM files in the same environment, which means that if something happens to the infrastructure supporting it, your snapshot files are just as vulnerable as the VM disk files.
A vSphere backup, or any other backup, must not be dependent on any part of the production infrastructure for recovery. In an emergency scenario, using a snapshot instead of a backup could be the difference between data recovery and data loss.
Investing in the right backup software
SolarWinds® Backup is a server, workstation, and Microsoft 365 data protection tool that’s easy to use and highly advanced, delivering a solution that’s both dependable and cost-effective. Recovery options include bare-metal recovery, file/folder restore, and virtual disaster recovery.
SolarWinds Backup is also effective as file archive software, with the ability to store your backups long-term and beyond variable retention periods. Storage is encrypted for added security, with data encrypted while at rest and in transit. It allows you to execute automated system restores to VMware or Hyper-V instances. It also gives you the ability to perform test recoveries to Hyper-V or VMware at any time.
With Exchange server recovery and continuous recovery capabilities, this tool is among the most versatile and intuitive data protection products available. The dashboard is web-based, making it easy to access from anywhere, and is easy to navigate. To find out if SolarWinds Backup is right for you, try our 30-day free trial here.