January 22, 2018 at 1:59 pm
We have a server with some databases which keep our company's financial data. We are Microsoft shop who only uses standard edition. We are heavily dependent on our backups which is in AWS. (what if backup file is no good?) I have asked my manager to ask the management to have a budget for a server so we can at least implement log shipping for so far no luck. We are talking about moving our on prem to Azure but is it a disaster recovery solution? To me, its not but I have been wrong before. Can someone tell me please what Azure can protect us from. Is moving to cloud a DR solution?
January 22, 2018 at 3:00 pm
NewBornDBA2017 - Monday, January 22, 2018 1:59 PMWe have a server with some databases which keep our company's financial data. We are Microsoft shop who only uses standard edition. We are heavily dependent on our backups which is in AWS. (what if backup file is no good?) I have asked my manager to ask the management to have a budget for a server so we can at least implement log shipping for so far no luck. We are talking about moving our on prem to Azure but is it a disaster recovery solution? To me, its not but I have been wrong before. Can someone tell me please what Azure can protect us from. Is moving to cloud a DR solution?
You didn't say what constitutes a failure. So here is my take. Your current backups are in AWS, that is a Amazon setup. Not sure if you are talking about two separate issues (AWS and Azure).
I test my backup every day by refreshing a reporting database (restoring from production db backup). So everyday I know for certain that my backup is good. If you want assurance, verify the backup on your own. As a backup solution, you can backup your on premises database to the cloud. I researched on Azure backup but didn't go with the solution for privacy and security reasons. If you are moving your database to Azure SQL database (or any other flavor), Azure offers TDE, threat detection/protection/alerts/geography redundancy. But we only use it for non-critical web-apps. What can possibly go wrong? One word - Equifax.
January 26, 2018 at 8:42 am
Disasters come in many flavors. I could
- lose a network connection
- have the instance software get corrupt or fail on a patch (db fine)
- lose storage under server (db files may or may not be fine)
- hardware failure
- corruption in db
- more
For some of these, backups protect, some they don't (corruption).
In Azure, if you run Azure SQL Database, there are 3 copies of your data files at most times (some replication delay if a copy fails). This means that you are protected from the hardware failure or instance going down. this is typically better than what most people do on premise.This doesn't necessarily protect from corruption, but MS can detect this since they have multiple copies and deal with potential firmware issues better than most of us.
You are dependent on a network connection, so perhaps this is better or worse for your environment.
If you run a VM in Azure, EC2 , or on premise, nothing is really different . You still need to run DBCC CHECKDB and make backups to be sure you can recover.
How you recover in each case is still something you'll need to manage. It's not necessarily better or worse, but really dependent on your skills and preparation.
Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply