Authors:
Heitor Faria
;
Priscila Solís
;
Jarcir Bordim
and
Rodrigo Hagstrom
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science (CIC), University of Brasilia (UnB), Brasilia, DF and Brazil
Keyword(s):
Backups, Disaster Recovery, Cloud, Backup-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service.
Abstract:
Backup is a replica of any data that can be used to restore its original form. However, the total amount of digital data created worldwide more than doubles every two years and is expected to reach 44 trillions of gigabytes in 2020, bringing constant new challenges to backup processes. Enterprise backup is one of the oldest and most performed tasks by infrastructure and operations professionals. Still, most backup systems have been designed and optimized for outdated environments and use cases. That fact, generates frustration over currently backup challenges and leads to a greater willingness to modernize and to consider new technologies. Traditional backup and archive solutions are no longer able to meet users current needs. The ideal modern backup and recovery software should not only provide features to attend a traditional data center, but also allow the integration and exploration of the growing Cloud, including “backup client as a service” and “backup storage as a service”. Th
e present study proposed and deploys a Backup as a Service software solution. For that, the cloud/backup parameters, cloud backup challenges, researched architectures and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) system requirements are specified. Then, a selected set of BaaS desired features are developed, resulting in the first truly cloud REST API based Backup-as-a-Service interface, namely “bcloud”. Finally, this work conducts an on-line usability poll with a significant number of users. The analysis of results in an overall average objective zero to ten questions evaluation was 8.29%, indicating a very satisfactory user perception of the bcloud BaaS interface prototype.
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