BACKUP FOR DATABASES

THOMAS LAROCK, HEAD GEEK, SOLARWINDS, ON HOW TO PLAN FOR DATABASE BACKUP STRATEGY

Data plays a vital role in any successful business. Protecting this data is mission-critical, and it falls to database administrators (DBAs) to organise, maintain, and secure it. The most effective way for DBAs to protect data is through database backups, a process designed to copy the data and schema from an existing database and save it elsewhere for future retrieval.

Like any process in IT, however, there are a few factors to consider when devising a database backup strategy to ensure it meets your business needs.

Set Clear Objectives

There are two objectives any organisation or DBA should know when backing up data: recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

RTOs refer to the amount of time needed to recover data, and RPOs refer to the point in time to which they must be able to recover. For example, the business might need DBAs to recover data to a backup made within the last day (the RPO) and may need it to be done within an hour of a disaster (the RTO).

Before a DBA devises a database backup strategy, they must be clear on these objectives and ensure the recovery strategy they devise will deliver on these goals. Backups by themselves are useless but restores are priceless. Start by planning a recovery strategy, and let it guide your backup strategy.

The cost-benefit analysis

When building a strategy of any kind, it’s important to conduct a costbenefit analysis for every aspect. For a database backup strategy, this filters down into the frequency of the backups and where the backups are stored.

Too much time between backups leaves data vulnerable. Businesses often lose track of the expanding data in their databases. If the recovery process isn’t tested frequently, you may find the backups are unusable or no longer meet the RTO/RPO requirements. This, of course, is when disaster will strike.

Another cost to consider is where your data is stored. A business can pay for offsite or cloud storage, both of which have their own, often large, price tags. Paying for a larger storage space and performing frequent backups will increase a business’s ability to recover and secure your data, but it comes with a cost. This is an essential consideration for businesses, especially as their data sets grow with their business.

Optimising Database Backup Strategies

Once the costs and benefits have been weighed, it’s time to optimise the database backup strategy.

First, and most importantly, DBAs should restore databases periodically to ensure they can perform recovery when it matters most, such as in the face of a ransomware attack. However, it isn’t feasible to constantly test each backup. This is where statistical sampling comes in. With statistical sampling, DBAs can figure out how many databases to restore periodically to minimise cost and maximise their ability to restore all databases in case of disaster. Instead of wasting time, energy, and money testing every backup every day, implementing statistical sampling allows DBAs to be 95% confident all the backups can be restored.

In theory, a backup shouldn’t impact any other operations happening inside the engine. But backups are often stored within a business’s shared systems, causing a major bottleneck every time a backup is performed. To avoid this, stagger your backups, undertake some at 2 a.m. and others at 5 a.m., for example, to avoid throttling the network and interfering with other systems and the normal course of business.

Implementing an effective database backup strategy is a no-brainer. But for it to be successful, businesses must appropriately analyse costs, risks, and benefits to determine the scale of the strategy. It’s also important for IT managers to understand their backup strategies holistically, from a business and an IT perspective, to ensure a cost-effective and robust database backup strategy is in place.

CLOUD CHAMPIONS

CXO INSIGHT ME RECOGNISED OUTSTANDING CLOUD PROJECTS IN THE REGION AT THE SECOND EDITION OF ITS CLOUD CONNECT CONFERENCE AND AWARDS

Cloud is driving business transformation. Be it public or private or multi-cloud, it has become the platform of choice for enterprise applications today. The pandemic has boosted cloud acceptance and adoption in the Middle East and has become technology of choice for business transformation initiatives.

The region’s outstanding cloud projects, service provider and vendors were recgonised by CXO Insight ME at the second edition of the Cloud Connect Conference and Awards.

The event was kicked off by Saad Ouchkir, head of customer engineering META at Google Cloud, who spoke about how to unlock innovation with Google Transformation Cloud. “We strive to be the trusted innovation partner of our customers and accelerate their digital transformation. We partner closely with organisations to help them become the best tech company in their industry,” he said.

This was followed by a panel discussion on why multi-cloud is a must-have for enterprises, featuring: Rahul Saraswat, cloud business unit head at Citrus consulting services; Aliasgar Dohadwala, CEO of Visiontech; Nader Baghdadi, senior regional director, Colortokens; and Arthur Dell, technology leader, Veritas.

CHANGE AGENTS

CHARBEL KHNEISSER, VICE PRESIDENT SOLUTIONS ENGINEERING – EMEA, RIVERBED, ON WHY YOUR TEAM NEEDS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT ENGINEERS

Technology today is increasingly sophisticated, complex, and advanced, and it can be difficult for IT teams to keep up with the specialised demands and really capitalise on the tech they have available. Most organisations have a number of different systems to integrate – but a lack of niche insight and expertise can often mean that businesses are not fully exploiting their IT systems and improving their performance.

Many Middle East businesses have invested in performance management technology that provides data on how their networks and apps perform. This gives them the potential to optimise the user experience and provide a better

service – essential for meeting the requirements of the region’s young, digital-savvy population. But to draw true value from this investment, it’s essential to have the specialist technical know-how to analyse the data and convert it into actionable insights – and many companies simply don’t have the expertise for this.

To enable companies to capitalise on the tech available, achieve better results and provide the service customers demand, we need an entire new role and job title – a performance management engineer.

Introducing the performance management engineer

In today’s complex technological world, it’s clear that the need has never been greater for employees capable of, and dedicated to, reading, understanding, and improving performance management. And analysing it as it relates to the enduser, independent of understanding the systems themselves.

With a new kind of IT employee in place – performance management engineers – companies will be empowered to transform their operations. For example, traditionally, IT staff were assigned to conducting network analysis when there was a specific issue that needed to be resolved. However, with dedicated experts carrying out ongoing monitoring, businesses can minimise time to resolution when challenges emerge, by shifting from a reactive to proactive approach.

This is because time to resolution is made up of four key factors – mean time to know there’s an issue, mean time to identify where the problem is coming from, mean time to fix it, and mean time to verify the fix. To date, organisations have had the talent to address the third factor – resolving the problem – but not to tackle the other three elements. With performance management engineers in place, capable of reading telemetry across the whole network in real-time, this will no longer be the case as they will have the expertise to deliver on all four areas. Not only will this reduce downtime, with positive knock-on effects for staff and customers, but it will also save money. The time to resolve an issue is fixed, but the mean times to know, locate and verify can be reduced, unlocking efficiency with its cost-saving benefits. What’s more, if you can eliminate the time to know there’s a problem, you’re able to take a preventative approach, meaning the entire issue could be avoided and the cost of impact brought down to zero.

The role of universities and companies

The value of performance management engineers is self-evident but making them a common fixture in every business’ IT team will require a change in approach by both companies and universities.

To build the talent pipeline, it will be essential for universities to update their courses to include a focus on performance management, rather than continuing to bill everything around technology topics on specific domains. In practice, this will mean giving students the right foundation to understand key concepts across the board so they can be polished from a performance perspective. For instance, arming them with the ability to understand the basics of coding (without having to be an expert) and giving them the analytical skills to assimilate knowledge and understand the outcomes so they can effectively analyse application performance problems.

In tandem, organisations need to evolve their mindsets to appreciate that what employees need is the right knowledge base to evolve from, as the specific skills their staff require will constantly change. With this understanding in place, the value of introducing performance management engineers can be truly appreciated.

Tackling the great resignation

Beyond improving network and application performance, introducing a new category of employee could help businesses stave off the impacts of the great resignation. Notably, by offering staff the intellectual growth and strong financial remuneration to keep them motivated and retained.

To dive deeper into the first element, it’s undeniable that in the last couple of years there’s been a boom in innovation. However, IT staff have not been equipped with the skills needed to keep pace with this, due to a lack of time and investment being dedicated to training, as they were focused on firefighting issues instead. By offering IT employees the opportunity and training to become performance management engineers, companies will provide them with new career opportunities. What’s more, moving into this role will turn staff into a more highly valuable resource with an attached monetary benefit for them.

The investment will be worth the payoff

Introducing a new category of employee dedicated to performance management will never be an overnight job. It will require universities and organisations to take active steps to cultivate this new group and prepare for their introduction to the workforce. Furthermore, if this effort is made, companies will be empowered to dramatically improve their network and application performance and achieve significant business benefits. These will range from greater employee and customer experiences, to reduced IT costs and an even better retention of employees. With this in mind, it’s time we pushed the button on introducing performance management engineers.