A Markov Decision Process Approach for Optimal Data Backup Scheduling

The explosive growth of data generation and increasing reliance of business analysis on massive data make data loss more damaging than ever before. Nowadays many organizations start relying on cloud services for keeping their valuable data. It is a critical issue for cloud service provider to protect the data for individual users securely and effectively. To protect the data in a system with multiple data sources, backup schedule plays an important role for achieving the desired level of data protection while minimizing the impact on system operation. In this paper we investigate the use of Markov Decision Process (MDP) to guide the scheduling of data backup operation and propose a framework to automatically generate an MDP instance from system specifications and data protection requirements. We then demonstrate the benefits of the MDP approach.