In the fast-paced digital world, backup and recovery play a crucial role in safeguarding an organization’s data. Imagine a catastrophic event that impacts an entire Google Cloud account – having a secure, logically air-gapped backup can provide a sense of security for your vital information.
On September 10, Google Cloud announced a significant enhancement to their backup and disaster recovery services – the introduction of an immutable vault.
This groundbreaking service is currently in preview mode but will soon be available to Google Cloud customers in selected regions in the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan in the upcoming months.
New Backup and Recovery Service is Logically Air-Gapped
The standout feature of the backup vault is its immutability, ensuring that data cannot be altered, and its indelibility, preventing it from being deleted. This secure vault receives data from the Backup and Disaster Recovery service, protecting it from cyberattacks or accidental errors. Moreover, even users within the organization cannot access the backup vault.
System administrators have the flexibility to configure a retention period during which the vault remains unmodifiable.
Furthermore, projects using Google’s Compute Engine VMs can now securely store their data in this new vault. The vaults are independent of the source project and can be based in Compute Engine VMs, VMware Engine VMs, Oracle databases, or SQL Server databases.
The process of backing up Compute Engine VMs seamlessly integrates into the VM provisioning process, aligning with Google Cloud Identity and Access Management policies for enhanced security and efficiency.
Create and Manage Google Compute Engine VMs
Administrators and developers can easily monitor scheduled backup and restore jobs, generate reports on job status, and receive alerts for essential backup-related events. To initiate a backup with a Compute Engine VM, administrators only need to define a backup plan within Google Cloud.
In addition to leveraging Google Cloud backups, organizations can explore the option of adopting a multi-cloud system. This approach provides added resilience, as highlighted by incidents such as the UniSuper outage caused by the loss of both Google Cloud accounts and backups earlier this year.