How to optimize Object Storage security and reliability

Data protection is key for continuity of your applications, services and other workloads relying on Scaleway’s Object Storage. Taking time to enhance security on top of your storage will reduce the risk of losing data and ensure availability at any time.

Imagine a corrupted version of your latest configuration file or unexpected deletion of one of your main media assets. This is not an issue when you have been proactive on Object Storage features such as versioning or object lock.

In this article, we will dive deeper into these key topics and explore how you can leverage Scaleway Object Storage to fortify your data protection strategy.

Object Storage goes beyond serving as a mere backup repository. With public cloud infrastructure, you can harness its potential for a wide range of use cases, such as big data, media diffusion, disaster recovery, and data archiving. By leveraging the scalability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility of our Object Storage, you can optimize your workflows while ensuring the security of your objects.

Think about Object Storage as a brick in your ecosystem, ensuring the storage of raw data for your most demanding workloads running on your Instances, or gathering all your media files that have been converted through a Serverless Function and uploaded to your bucket.

1. Access Management made easy

Managing access in a precise way is a key factor of success when it comes to securing your infrastructure and data. Bucket policies allow you to control your users’ and applications’ access at the resource level. You can manage access to Object Storage with IAM while precisely defining access rules for each bucket and object using bucket policies.

This applies to people from your organization depending on their team and scope of work, but also ensures the security of data when internal or external applications access your Object Storage.

In concrete terms, IAM will help you avoid human errors and security breaches by setting simple permission sets. Define your first bucket policy with IAM to protect your objects and ensure security of your data.

2. Versioning: safeguard against unwanted changes

Who has never overwritten an object and regretted it? Scaleway Object Storage provides a powerful versioning feature that allows you to save previous versions of your objects.

With versioning enabled, you can react in case of accidental deletion or unwanted modifications. This way, you can effortlessly restore a previous version, and gain data integrity and peace of mind.

Follow our tutorial to enable bucket versioning on your own buckets.

3. Set up lifecycle rules with a two-tiered backup strategy

Having data stored in the cloud doesn’t replace a robust backup strategy. This is where Object Storage can help you by using hot storage for primary backups and Glacier (cold storage) for secondary backups.

As the amount of data is continuously growing, the question of cost is inevitable. Hot storage ensures rapid access to data but is expensive. Glacier offers cost-effective long-term archiving, but it takes about 12 hours to download the first byte of data. By adopting this dual-tiered approach, you can balance performance and cost efficiency while maintaining data redundancy.

Scaleway Object Storage allows you to define lifecycle rules that automatically expire or transition your data from hot storage to Glacier after a specified time. The lifecycle rule can also move data from a Multi-AZ class to a One Zone-Infrequent Access class.

Create your first lifecycle rules and start transitioning your least frequently accessed data from hot storage class to Glacier.

4. Set up a disaster recovery plan with third-party integrations

To further streamline your disaster recovery plan, Scaleway Object Storage seamlessly integrates with Atempo, Veeam, or other leading third-party solutions. Thanks to this integration, you can orchestrate and automate your backup and recovery workflows, ensuring data consistency and reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs). This will enhance the overall security and reliability of your data protection strategy.

5. Object lock: protect critical data from unauthorized alterations

Think about financial or healthcare industries, where business records or patient data have to be sealed for future audit or legal analysis. For these cases, Scaleway Object Storage offers an object lock feature. This feature enables you to enforce immutability for selected objects in versioned buckets, ensuring the original version of your object cannot be modified for a specified duration. By utilizing object lock, you can maintain data integrity and protect from malicious activities or ensure compliance.

6. Preventive rebuild: Ensuring durability

Thanks to erasure coding, Scaleway Object Storage stores parity chunks in addition to object chunks. This mechanism ensures that your data remains intact and accessible, even in the face of potential hardware failures.

Scaleway infrastructure proactively monitors for any missing chunks of objects and initiates automatic rebuild processes to maintain data integrity. If one chunk doesn’t exist anymore (due to hardware failure) we rebuild it based on the remaining chunks. Preventive rebuild keeps you from losing so many chunks that you can’t rebuild an object anymore and face data loss.

Wrapping up

Whether you’re running a media streaming service or SaaS application with user-generated content, Scaleway Object Storage will ensure high-availability access to your data. Trust that your data is safe and intact thanks to automatic preventive rebuild.

Scaleway Glacier (cold storage class) is your solution for data archiving, compliance, and disaster recovery. Store your historical data for legal or business purposes, keep backups secure and accessible, and meet regulatory requirements with ease.

By embracing the various features and best practices outlined in this article, you can leverage the full potential of our Object Storage solution. From Identity & Access Management to utilizing hot and cold storage for backups, implementing versioning, lifecycle rules, object lock, Scaleway empowers you to fortify your data protection strategy.