Backup Blog Bites #5: Building a Solid Backup Asset Inventory

Given the importance of backup and recovery systems in any organization, maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date inventory of all backup infrastructure is critical. 

A general-purpose inventory focuses on end-points and servers, but won’t correctly capture the full scope of your backup environment. When it comes to an inventory, those of you who have used such data sources know that data quality and completeness is everything.  

So what should a backup inventory include? 

While not a full listing, here are several things to take into consideration when building an inventory for backup environments: 

• Backup UI servers 
• Backup Catalog (Repository) databases and servers 
• Backup Media servers, data movers or nodes 
• Backup Clients 
• Backup destinations – disk array 
• Backup destinations – tape 
• Backup destinations – cloud 
• Backup proxy servers 
• Backup CLI software installations 
• Backup console software installations 
• Backup appliances and underlying server hardware 
• Backup host servers  
• Backup SaaS components 
• Backup plugins for primary storage systems (Backup from snapshot) 
• Backup plugins for hypervisor 
• Backup plugins for databases 
• Backup plugins for apps 
• Deduplication software components 
• Orchestration, Reporting, Analytics and other management software installations 
• REST API servers 
• SMIS servers 
• Key Management software and servers 
• Vault & air-gapping devices and/or software installations 
• … and more. 

In less than 1 hour, assess the security of your backup environment: 
https://www.continuitysoftware.com/assess-the-security-of-your-backup-storage-environment