Articulating the Value of Backup for Google Cloud Workloads

We can’t tell you how many times this question comes up in conversation.

“We backup with Google Snapshots, why do I need to use anything else to backup my Google Cloud workloads?”

The short answer to the question is snapshots are not backups. It’s something we’ve covered in the past, “Why You Need Cloud-native Data Protection When You Have Snapshots.”

If your boss asks you to provide business reasons, here are three simple things you can tell him/her: Safety, Surety and Savings

Safety:

To dive deeper, data security is key for any organization and while snapshots can help, you need to have protection against unknown enemies such as ransomware. If you rely on snapshots alone being available as resources within projects, they can be easily deleted if a project is compromised.

With HYCU, you can backup to centralized storage in a dedicated project accessed only by HYCU through the service account with WORM and retention lock set and provide the necessary protection. The safety you get against a ransomware attack and ransom payment, is obviously priceless.

Surety:

Using snapshots as backup also presents challenges in terms of complex snapshot scheduling and the management of exorbitant number of snapshots over a period of time. As we know, complexity leads to mistakes and worry about not covering all your bases.

Savings:

Let’s put this into tangible terms. If you have a 1TB VM (used capacity) churning at the rate of 5% daily and protected as a snapshot and you need to archive it on a monthly basis and retained for a year, that VM alone will cost you $2,563/year.

If you compare this to using HYCU, a cloud-native data protection solution running as a native service of Google Cloud, keep the backup in a standard tier and archive monthly to nearline storage, the total cost would be $690/year. The savings alone in this case would be net 250% on backup storage.

Sometimes the hardest questions don’t need a book to answer. If you’re interested in hearing more on how HYCU can help you maximize your cost savings to manage, migrate, protect and recover data across on-premises to public clouds like Google Cloud, reach out to us at info@hycu.com.