COST EFFECTIVE DISTRIBUTED DATA BACKUP SYSTEM FOR AN ENTERPRISE NETWORK

Abstract

Information is the main concern in a business these days. All business processes relies on that. Most of the time this information management process is done by using computer systems. But system failures are common to any system including enterprise ready systems. Failure of a system will cause unavailability of information. If information is unavailable, that can be a huge damage to a business process and to its reputation. To avoid such situation, system administrators take regular backups and keep them in a different location. Even some locations can be in a remote location far away from original system is running. As information is critical, administrators must take backups in a regularly and keep these backup in a secure location. In the enterprise world, there are system to do that task as well. Those systems will take regular backups, compress and copy to a disk or to a storage area network. Most of the systems use compression and encryption, but if the backup location is unavailable there is no way to restore the backups. Aim of this research is to provide robust data backup system which can ensure the security and its availability. The system we are introducing use multiple cloud storage systems to store data in a secure way. There are lots of cloud storage provides with cheap price tag and the cost of using those are less than using out own storage infrastructures. In this system each backup data set will be split into several parts and forward to those cloud storage using secure channels. Data storing mechanism will ensure that each part of the split backup will store in at least two locations. It will improve the redundancy of the backup and the restore process even if one storage goes offline. Hashing of each data chunk will ensure the integrity of data. Administrators only need to give the initial configurations and backup schedules to the system. Then the system itself will manage the entire backup process. Since we have our own way of securing data we can use really cheap cloud solutions without relying on providers data security mechanisms.