Data; Storage and Retention: Google Cloud Storage

Data. It’s one thing every organization has. And lots of it.  From CCTV footages, historical vendor data such invoices, receipts to complex data about your customers, employees etc.But yet the organization grapples with what to do with its data, where and how to store it and most importantly, how to make sense of it. Google Cloud Storage provides a convenient, low cost way to store and serve your unstructured data for such use cases. What’s more, it is possible to copy and move your data frequently from your on premise to Google Cloud for storage and stream data.

Backups, Archival and Disaster Recovery with GCS

Service-interrupting events can happen at any time. Your network could have an outage, your latest application push might introduce a critical bug, or you might someday have to contend with a natural disaster. When things go awry, it’s important to have a robust, targeted, and well-tested DR plan.

With a well-designed, well-tested DR plan in place, you can make sure that if catastrophe hits, the impact on your business’s bottom line will be minimal. No matter what your DR needs look like, Google Cloud has a robust, flexible, and cost-effective selection of products and features that you can use to build or augment the solution that is right for you.

DR is a subset of business continuity planning. DR planning begins with a business impact analysis that defines two key metrics:

  • A recovery time objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time that your application can be offline. 

A recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time during which data might be lost from your application due to a major incident. This metric varies based on the ways that the data is used. For example, user data that’s frequently modified could have an RPO of just a few minutes. In contrast, less critical, infrequently modified data could have an RPO of several hours. (This metric describes only the length of time; it doesn’t address the amount or quality of the data that’s lost.)