As we discussed in a previous blog (Backup is a Moving Target), it’s not an easy task to balance competing demands for backup and data protection. With data being created at an ever-increasing rate and an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape to handle, IT departments have their work cut out to balance productivity with risk management, backup and recovery.
This challenge juggles the sometimes contrasting objectives of protecting a growing amount of data being created on a daily basis by the organisation, while keeping storage, backup and recovery costs under control – oh, and making sure users have the right access to data and tools to securely share it.
More ‘single panes of glass’ than a window store
A data protection that addresses these challenges in parallel with one another is therefore essential to striking the right balance. The traditional tried and trusted method of backing up and managing data has been to use point products to solve specific needs such as backing up from physical servers or virtual machines, and then different tools for deduplication, archiving and so on.
With each one of these point products coming with its own user interface, capabilities, policies, indexing and copies to manage, there’s only so many hours in a day, budget to go round, and ‘single panes of glass’ that IT can realistically be expected keep track of.
Can you have your cake and eat it?
Maybe – but the first hurdle to clear is the need to take a step back and actually think about what your organisation’s backup, recovery and data management challenges are, what products you currently have in place, and if and how those challenges could be managed more efficiently and cost effectively.
As with many things, it pays to keep data protection and backup simple. Complexity can be eliminated by rationalising the aforementioned point solutions into one single console that can capture and recover data from multiple environments. With this, there are obvious savings to be had on purchasing and licensing of point solutions, as well as the costs associated to their deployment, management and support.
In addition to the obvious cost and resource savings to be made from having a holistic backup and recovery solution, it also has the benefit of being able to pull in data from all environments and use cases. By covering the complete spectrum of data copy use cases, it’s then possible to simplify management and enable policy-based automation to run across all data sources. This policy-based approach gives IT the ability to automatically schedule tasks defined by service level or thresholds and points in time.
This approach also makes for a more seamless means of managing and migrating data to, from and within the cloud as well as within and between clouds. This takes out complexity and avoids the risk of lock-in to single cloud environments, thereby giving your organisation more freedom to make the infrastructure decisions it needs to without external limitations.
