BCDR in Google Cloud
1. BCDR in Google Cloud
Hello and welcome to the next step in your cloud security journey. In this video, we’ll explore the critical world of business continuity and disaster recovery, or BCDR for short, within Google Cloud. BCDR ensures your operations continue despite unexpected disasters or threats. Google Cloud provides lots of tools that integrate seamlessly with BCDR planning and execution, making protecting your organization's data easier. That way, you can keep your services running after a disaster. Let's examine a BCDR tool in Google Cloud. Google Cloud Backup and DR is a backup and disaster recovery solution that enables organizations to quickly recover data, so that they can continue running critical business operations. To get started with Google Cloud Backup and DR, you'll need to first create a backup plan. You can use the backup plan to define the parameters of your backup. For example, how often to back up your data, how long to retain the backups, and where and how to replicate the backups. Once you've created your backup plan, you can restore your data whenever you need to with just a couple of clicks. For example, if your organization is targeted by ransomware, employees might not be able to access files encrypted by the ransomware. Business operations will be negatively affected, and employees won’t be able to do work until they can access the data. After the security team successfully contains the ransomware, you use the backup plan to quickly find and deploy a backup that has not been infected with ransomware. This allows you to quickly recover your data and get operations back to normal. We've reviewed backup plans, but what about disaster recovery plans? Let's examine what you should consider when creating a Disaster Recovery Plan, or DRP, within Google Cloud. For example, it’s important to consider how backups will be set up through replication, what your measures of success during a recovery are, and what happens if there's a failover. You’ll also need to test the plan and have maintenance strategies. And lastly, you should consider the cost implications of a disaster. This includes the cost of downtime if your organization is unable to operate and the cost of restoring data. Let’s discuss these considerations in more detail. First is replication, or the process of continuously creating copies of data to multiple locations to support availability. Replication is vital to any disaster recovery plan because it helps ensure that data can be quickly restored. While working in the cloud, it’s important to consider replication options that utilize storage in different regions of the world. For example, OnVault can be used to safely store backup data from virtual machines. Another option is StreamSnap, which is used for data mirroring. Data mirroring creates exact copies of data in remote locations. This provides opportunities for replication across multiple regions to improve data availability during a disaster. Now that you’ve learned how data is backed up, let’s discuss measures of success. These include how often data backups happen, and how quickly you’ll need to get business operations back to normal when carrying out a disaster recovery plan. In a disaster recovery plan, you need to decide how much data can be lost, and how long systems can be down. Both are critical measurements of success for a disaster recovery plan. Google Cloud's compute, storage, networking, and software services can support your team in making these objectives possible. Next, let's examine failover, which helps protect systems from failure. For failover scenarios, deploying Compute Engine and managed instance groups can provide automatic failover in the event of an instance or zone failure. For example, imagine your organization uses Google Cloud to run a critical application on Compute Engine. The application is deployed in a single zone. Keep in mind that a failure in one zone affects all of the resources in that zone. So if the organization wants to improve the critical application's availability, they need to add failover. The organization can achieve improved application availability by creating a managed instance group with two instances located in different zones. The application can then be configured to run on both instances. If one instance fails, the other instance will continue to run the application. As always, testing your disaster recovery plan is crucial. In the previous example, the organization can also set up regular disaster recovery testing to verify if the failover works as intended. As a security professional, you can test your plan periodically and conduct tests to simulate a computer instance failure. If the testing fails, you are alerted and can investigate and address the issue. Conducting regular disaster recovery testing will ensure your plan is effective and can help you identify improvement areas. Finally, here’s a pro tip. Maintaining your disaster recovery plan is key. Your company’s cloud presence will change over time, and your disaster plan needs to change accordingly. Your plan needs regular maintenance to stay current. Now that you know more about setting up and maintaining a backup and disaster recovery plan in the cloud, you’re well prepared to help your organization navigate security disasters with confidence.2. Let's practice!
Create Your Free Account
or
By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.