Azure DevOps is one of the most popular tools in the version control category. According to the Azure Active Directory, more than 722M users worldwide have chosen Azure DevOps as their “top option” among GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
The reason why more and more companies are opting for Microsoft’s tool is easy to understand. The platform attracts with its high availability, rapid problem-solving capabilities, CI/CD pipeline automation, tight integration with Microsoft ecosystem, etc. Yet, is it enough to rely solely on the platform to secure your data? As with any valuable data, the risk of data loss or corruption is always here. Thus, organizations should think about how to back up their critical DevOps data and build a reliable Azure DevOps backup strategy.
Why backup of the Azure DevOps organization is a must
As any other Cloud services provider, Microsoft takes all the necessary precautions to make sure that its service runs smoothly without any interruptions. For that reason, it has backups… however, at this point, we need to mention the Shared Responsibility Model, which defines the duties of both the provider and the customer.
According to it, the responsibility of a service provider is the security of the platform’s services, availability, and data – backup is a part of that strategy. Thus, Microsoft backs up its entire Azure DevOps ecosystem. And in case of an outage, it will be able to restore its service. What about users’ Azure DevOps account data? It’s a user’s responsibility to have backups and check them when there is a need to restore their data. Here is a quote from Microsoft’s data protection overview:
“While these backups [Microsoft’s backups – editor’s comment] serve as a crucial component for disaster recovery, it’s essential for customers to practice appropriate data management and backup strategies to ensure comprehensive protection of their data.”
We should understand that outages are not the only risks that can threaten Azure DevOps customers’ data. Human errors and accidental deletions are among the top data loss scenarios. Can Microsoft restore your data in this situation? Everything is not so easy. Here is what the official documentation states: “We [Microsoft] don’t support restoring assets that customers accidentally delete. These backups are meant only for business continuity and to aid recovery from outage or disaster scenarios.”
Reasons to backup
Well, the Shared Responsibility Model is not the only reason to back up your Azure DevOps account data. Here, we should also mention the following:
- Various disaster scenarios, service outages, infrastructure downtime, ransomware attacks, human errors, etc.
- compliance, as to meet some security protocols’ regulations, like GDPR, ISO 27001, etc., you must have backup service and Disaster Recovery mechanisms,
- high costs for downtime, just to note – the average cost of downtime can rise up to $9K per minute, so it’s in the company’s interests to minimize or even eliminate downtime and ensure business continuity.
How to build your backup strategy for Azure DevOps backup
When it comes to building an Azure DevOps backup strategy, you need to consider every potential scenario that could lead to data loss. As Desiderius Erasmus said, “Prevention is better than cure”. In our case, the prevention measure is the Azure DevOps backup… Isn’t it easier to respond to a disaster scenario – any outage, ransomware attack, downtime, or data loss – when you already have all the mechanisms to restore your data before this failure even happens?
Thus, let’s look at the features that a reliable backup for Azure DevOps data should include to ensure that your DevOps data is accessible, available, and recoverable from any point in time…
Automated scheduled backup for Azure DevOps data protection
Every piece of the data matters. Thus, your backup should cover all your repositories and related metadata for data protection of your entire Azure DevOps environment. So, your backups for Azure DevOps data, no matter which deployment model you operate on – Cloud or Server – should include git repositories, pull requests, boards, processes, pipelines, projects, source code, work items, test plans, and other important data stored in Azure DevOps resources.
Moreover, you should have the possibility to schedule your automated and regular backup policies to meet your security, compliance, or business requirements. It will not only make your DevOps team’s life easier, as they can concentrate on their core duties instead of managing and maintaining Azure DevOps backup scripts, but it will also eliminate human errors related to inadequately performed backup copies.
Long-term retention and compliance
In Azure DevOps, you can set your retention policies to figure out for how long you need to keep your runs, tests, and releases in the system. Usually, these retention policies vary, and Azure DevOps allows you to retain data for up to 365 days.
Yet, what if you need to keep your data for longer periods? You may need it for security or compliance reasons. For example, GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPPA, and FISMA require organizations to retain data for longer periods.
Another reason to retain your data for a longer time is to track changes or the possibility of modifying your project at an early stage of its creation. Thus, long-term or unlimited retention can permit you to restore data from a specific point in time, even if your Azure DevOps backup copy is from an older version.
The 3-2-1 backup rule
It’s a well-known security practice to have a few backup copies of your data in a few different storage locations. One of the most popular rules is the 3-2-1 backup rule, which assumes that you have at least three copies of your data in more than two storage destinations with one offsite. If you fail to access one of your data storage locations, you can always access your Azure DevOps backup copy on another storage device.
This means that your Azure DevOps backup strategy should allow you to back up your source code to multiple Cloud and local destinations. Moreover, you should be able to replicate your backup data between storage instances so that every backup copy is up-to-date.
Monitoring capabilities
One of the most crucial aspects of backup is the assurance that your backup copy is performed successfully. This allows you to be sure that you can restore your Azure DevOps data at any point in time, should a disaster occur.
Thus, you should get email or Slack notifications on backup performance or have a dedicated monitoring and management center to see the status of your ongoing backup tasks or historic events.
Ransomware protection
In recent years, ransomware and cyber attacks have been on the rise. Just to note, the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack can go up to $2.7M. To avoid falling victim to a ransomware attack and experiencing data loss and financial expenses, organizations need to take all the necessary measures to secure their data—and backup is a final line of protection against ransomware.
One of the main requirements for Azure DevOps backup is to be ransomware-proof. This means that your backups should be encrypted at rest and in flight, ideally with your own encryption key, and kept in immutable storage so that even if ransomware targets your storage destination, it won’t be able to spread inside it. In this case, you will be able to restore your data from any point in time, ensuring your business continuity and minimizing or even eliminating data loss.
Disaster Recovery and business continuity
We have already mentioned that your Azure DevOps backup strategy should foresee any disaster scenario. Moreover, it should allow you to resume your business continuity as soon as possible, minimizing downtime and financial losses.
That’s why your backup option for Azure DevOps should allow you point in time restore, granular recovery of repositories or only selected Azure DevOps metadata, cross-over recovery to another Git platform, like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, restore to your local device, the same or a new repository.
Takeaway
Building its own Azure DevOps backup strategy can be a complicated task that will take a share of the DevOps team’s time and resources, as they will need to write backup scripts, perform them, maintain them, do test restores, etc. With the growth of your operational Azure DevOps data, it can become even more time-consuming, ineffective, and costly. On average, teams may need around 250+ hours a year on backup processes, though there is no guarantee that in case of a disaster, your organization will be able to resume work fast after a failure.
You can adopt a dedicated third-party backup tool, like GitProtect.io’s Azure DevOps backup and Disaster Recovery software. In this case, with backup best practices in place, like automated scheduled backups, ransomware protection features, and Disaster Recovery technology, you will ensure data availability and immediate recovery should the event of failure occur. Moreover, your DevOps team will be able to concentrate on their core duties, minimizing human errors – all they will need to do is monitor how the backup is performed. The backup software provides central monitoring capabilities, Slack and email notifications, SLA and compliance reports, and advanced audit logs.
Every business decides for itself how to build its backup strategy to protect its source code and project data and meet the Shared Responsibility Model, security, and compliance requirements. Most importantly, the backup option should allow the company to restore its critical data immediately, eliminating data loss and downtime.
