GCP – Introducing protection summary, a new Google Cloud Backup and DR feature

In today’s cloud environments, data protection is paramount. Ensuring your backups are configured correctly and aligned with your business continuity requirements is critical for business continuity and resilience against threats like ransomware. However, understanding your backup coverage across a complex cloud environment can be challenging. That’s why we’re excited to announce the preview of protection summary, a new feature in Google Cloud Backup and DR that provides a centralized view of your backup configurations, helps you identify gaps in your data protection, and empowers you to take action to improve your resilience.

We’re enhancing the efficiency and visibility of your VM data protection with two new key features: protection summary and the data protection tab. This blog will focus on protection summary, a new capability designed to provide a consolidated, at-a-glance view of your VM’s backup state. Complementing this, our second launch of the data protection tab brings together backup and continuous data replication options for block storage in a single unified interface. Click here to learn more.

Introducing protection summary

Protection summary, a new capability in the Google Cloud Backup and DR management experience, allows you to view the backup configuration state of your resources. Protection summary helps you to easily identify resources that have not been configured for backup, discover those that are configured and identify areas where you can enhance your data protection.

Identify resources with no backup configuration

Quickly discover resources that lack any backup configuration and take immediate steps to protect them. Supported resource types include Compute Engine VMs and Cloud SQL instances. 

While some workloads such as test environments may not need any data protection at all, most production workloads need data protection from temporary outages, disasters, user errors, and malware.

Protection summary evaluates various data protection options offered by Google Cloud to determine if backups are configured for a resource. If a VM has a backup plan, a template for backups in the Backup and DR Service management console, or if any of the disks have a snapshot schedule, then it is considered configured for backup. This definition does not include any third-party or custom protection tools that you may be using. 

If there are no such data protection options being used, protection summary lists them under “backups not configured”, thus helping you identify gaps in protection.

Configure backups for resources

For resources that are listed as having backups not configured, protection summary allows you to assess the available backup options for a resource type and select the appropriate option based on your needs. For Compute Engine, available backup options include backup plans offered by the Backup and DR service and snapshot schedules offered by Compute Engine. For Cloud SQL instances, you can configure automated backups offered by Cloud SQL. Choose the option that works best for you and continue to configure backups.

Assess backup configurations

Easily view how your current backup setup looks and identify areas for improvement. Understand your vulnerability to ransomware attacks and implement best practices like backup vaults to protect your backups from deletion or corruption.

• When the configuration state is ‘vaulted’, it means backups are stored in a backup vault. This vault uses an enforced retention setting to provide immutability, preventing bad actors from deleting your backups. 

• When the configuration state is ‘not vaulted’, it means backups are not stored in the backup vault and are stored using other backup capabilities. While this serves many common needs, they do not offer the same level of enforced retention as a backup vault. 

You can also review the details of configuration state, backup schedules, location and last successful backup time to ensure they meet your requirements.

How it works

To view the protection summary for your resources, simply navigate to the Backup and DR management experience in the Google Cloud console. Enable the Backup and DR API in the project where you want to view the protection summary.

Navigate to the protection summary page and select the region and resource type of your choice to proceed. You can now view all the resources split into two tabs based on their backup configuration state.

Finally, to ensure that you have data protection enabled from the get-go, you can add protection by selecting suitable options while creating your Compute Engine VMs. Read more about how to set up this protection on our other blog on Data Protection.

Get started today

Protection summary is now available in preview in the Google Cloud Backup and DR management experience. Try it out today and get visibility into your backup configuration state. Learn more here.