Hello, this is indeed an interesting topic. A full tenant backup, snapshot, is what is required, then full restores can be made at a point in time, along with other instances. Whilst this has always been a thing for on-premise solutions, is it actually not-so much of a thing for Cloud tenants. If Qlik is mission-mission critical from an availability perspective then you should ideally have two tenants, mirrored in different regions from the get go (this also has a level of risk-as issues will replicate). If only mission-critical then having the ability to rollback to a 'snapshot' of a point in time is needed. Motio and Stretch can help you with this. As can our own solutions Harmony (Manage) and Symphony (Orchestrate). What is important is to understand the risks that you are looking to mitigate and how you can manage them.
I have a background in advising on mission critical solution architecture design for real-time ERP solutions and it always astounds me how little is understood on this subject. Probably rightly so, because we should be able to trust vendors, such as Qlik. But that is irresponsible. Let's be clear You are responsible for your organisational risks and mitigating them. Your organisation will have policies on this subject, and you need to adhere to them. We as partners can only advise and support you to comply.
Simply, Qlik Cloud is provisioned and offers platform resilience. All your content and configuration is your responsibility to architect from a HA and DR perspective. Since many customers will have migrated from cloud hosted on-premise solutions where backups were simply a single mouse click away, we need to recognise that we no longer control this process nor can we recover a single Tenant independently (I am not even sure Qlik can, nor offers the ability to do so).
The solution is to make Qlik Cloud an endpoint and not the centre of your architecture. Ensure that all config and content is documented and stored remotely before deploying to Qlik Cloud, and you are golden. it sounds simple, but it requires planning and new processes being applied.
Then, at any time you can replace any component from "store" to recover an issues on the tenant itself.
One of the reasons that we built Harmony for Qlik and also Symphony for Qlik is to enable the automated processing of tenant management and management between multiple Qlik instances (as endpoints). For example Symphony can orchestrate app copy between on prem and cloud, between cloud, from storage to cloud etc. All based on triggers from systems that may be outside of Qlik, e.g. Snowflake.
Large Qlik customers do all this today with Qlik Engineers that use PowerShell, Python, and other tools to service their estates. The issue that I have with this is transparency; visibility of what is actually happening, as there is no central hub. Symphony for Qlik gives you this, and all processes can be observed as they occur to create your enterprise Qlik observability management solution. Which also provides automated approvals for real time system administration. Demoed during 2024 at events, via mobile using WhatsApp no less.
I hope this gives some insight into how important a responsibility it is that you own your Qlik Tenant and managing control and risk should be a high priority. All technology has risk and requires process controls to be in place. For Qlik to be an enterprise solution we need to architect it as we would any other business critical platform.
