How to Back Up to Google Cloud Platform

 

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) gives enterprises the scalability they need to run modern workloads. But running workloads on GCP does not mean your data is automatically protected. A ransomware attack, accidental deletion, or misconfiguration can wipe out data that GCP will not restore for you. Protecting that data requires a deliberate backup strategy, and understanding exactly where Google's responsibility ends and yours begins.

GCP (now commonly called Google Cloud) is Google's public cloud platform, offering compute, storage, database, and networking services at enterprise scale. This guide covers how GCP backup works, what the native tools can and cannot do, and what to look for in a third-party solution.

Public cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), are becoming increasingly popular, as enterprises pursue digital transformation in an effort to be more agile and flexible. The price of that agility and flexibility, however, is increased complexity when it comes to managing and protecting data across hybrid or multicloud environments.  

Part of the complexity occurs as a result of a common assumption: that the cloud provider is responsible for protecting an organization’s data. That assumption is mistaken, and can put your data at risk.

 

The Shared Responsibility Model

All public cloud providers, GCP included, operate under a Shared Responsibility model. That means while the cloud platform does offer uptime, redundancy, and failover functionality, it does not back up customer data or provide for recovery point in time capabilities.

 

 

GCP’s definition of Shared Responsibility, for example, states that Google is responsible for managing the security of its infrastructure and customers are responsible for securing their data. It’s also stated within GCP’s terms of service: “Customer is solely responsible for securing and backing up its application, project, and customer data.” Any kind of data or application you would back up on-premises should be backed up in the cloud. Simply storing your virtual machines, data, and applications in the cloud doesn’t mean you have a backup.

What is GCP Backup?

GCP backup refers to the process of creating protected, recoverable copies of workloads running on Google Cloud, including Compute Engine virtual machines, Cloud SQL databases, SAP HANA, and unstructured data stored in Cloud Storage. These backups protect against data loss from accidental deletion, ransomware, application errors, and regional outages.

Two key metrics define any backup strategy:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss your organization can tolerate, measured in time. A 4-hour RPO means backups run at least every 4 hours.

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum time to restore a workload to normal operation after an incident.

Your backup solution must support defined RPO and RTO targets, not just create copies.

What Are the Three Types of Backups?

Most GCP backup strategies combine three backup types:

1. Full backup: A complete copy of all data. Most comprehensive but most storage-intensive.

2. Incremental backup: Captures only data that changed since the last backup. Faster and smaller, but requires a full backup plus all increments to restore.

3. Differential backup: Captures all changes since the last full backup. Simpler to restore than incremental, with moderate storage overhead.

Enterprise backup solutions, including Rubrik, use incremental-forever architectures that provide full-backup restore performance without the storage cost of repeated full backups.

GCP Backup Tools Have Limitations

While GCP does offer some cloud backup functionality that you can take advantage of, it’s fairly limited and often involves manual processes. For instance, Google Cloud does offer snapshot capabilities, but it’s difficult to access or automate them in any way. GCP-native backups also don’t have the monitoring and data management tools that are typically included in on-premises backup solutions.

Backup tooling that comes with GCP also isn’t sufficient to protect and manage your data across an entire hybrid or multicloud ecosystem—and that’s an important issue, as a majority of enterprises are using hybrid or multicloud systems, according to industry experts.

Google does offer a managed Backup and DR Service for GCP workloads, which provides centralized backup management for Compute Engine instances and databases using backup vaults and backup plans. However, it is designed specifically for Google Cloud resources and does not extend to on-premises infrastructure or workloads running on other cloud platforms. Organizations operating across hybrid or multicloud environments will find this scope too narrow for enterprise-wide data protection.

What You Should Look for in Cloud Data Protection for GCP

A better solution than the native GCP tooling is one that offers a wide range of functionality that can extend GCP’s existing capabilities—for instance, a solution that leverages the provider’s built-in snapshots, as well as Google Cloud Storage Buckets and Google’s Identity and Access Management features. By leveraging Google’s capabilities, the solution can eliminate the need for agents and doesn’t negatively affect application consistency.

Cloud-native architecture. The solution should leverage GCP's built-in capabilities, including disk snapshots, Cloud Storage buckets, and IAM, rather than installing agents on every VM. Agent-free backup avoids performance overhead and eliminates a class of compatibility issues.

Application-consistent backups. Crash-consistent snapshots capture disk state but can leave databases in a corrupted state. Application-consistent backups coordinate with the database engine to flush writes before the snapshot, ensuring a clean restore point.

Immutable, air-gapped backup storage. Ransomware increasingly targets backups. Look for solutions that store backup data in an immutable format, meaning it cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted, even by a compromised administrator account. Air-gapped storage adds a second layer by logically separating backup data from the production environment.

Defined RPO and RTO. The solution should enforce backup schedules and retention policies that meet your defined recovery objectives, with automated alerts when a backup job fails or falls behind.

Multi-region and cross-project coverage. Enterprise GCP environments span dozens or hundreds of projects across multiple regions. The solution should auto-discover workloads, apply policies via Google Cloud labels, and scale across Google Orgs without manual configuration per project.

Hybrid and multicloud support. If any workloads run on-premises, on AWS, or on Azure, the solution should protect all of them from a single platform, so your team does not manage separate backup tools for each environment.

 

How Rubrik Can Help

Rubrik’s approach to cloud backup and recovery for data in GCP is extremely simple. We offer a single software solution designed specifically to work within GCP to orchestrate all the most important functions, from backup and recovery to search, cloud archival, analytics, and more—and it works across your hybrid or multicloud environment.  

• Maintain control of all your data by keeping it in your Google Cloud Projects—with the addition of automated backup and accelerated operational recovery features. 

• Automate data management and enable quick access to data through global search and a robust metadata catalog.

• Simplify cloud backup across hundreds of Google Cloud Projects or across multiple Google Orgs.

• Auto-protect GCP instances through native support for Google Cloud labels. 

• Automate discovery and assignments of SLA policies to SAP HANA databases. 

• Enjoy centralized policy management, reporting, and overall data management from a single control plane.  

Learn more about how Rubrik can help you better protect and manage your data on Google Cloud Platform.