Is your approach to data protection more expensive than useful?
Data protection has always been a concern for IT groups, but with the massive influx of data from a multitude of sources, ensuring that the data remains accessible, available, and, most important, secure has become a more critical piece of the IT role. With downtime or data loss having extensive repercussions, it is clear that data is the lifeblood of an organization.
With the recent increase in cyberattacks and exponential data growth, protecting data has become job one for many IT organizations. And in many cases, their biggest hurdle is managing an aging backup infrastructure with limited resources.
Tight budgets should not discourage business leaders from modernizing data protection. Organizations that hang on to older backup technology don't have the tools they need to face today's threats. Rigid, siloed infrastructures aren't agile or scalable enough to keep up with fluctuations in data requirements, and they are based on an equally rigid backup approach. Traditional backup systems behave like insurance policies, locking data away until it's needed. That's like keeping an extra car battery in the garage, waiting for a possible crisis. The backup battery might seem like a reasonable preventive measure, but most of the time, it's a waste of space. And if the crisis never arises, it's an unnecessary upfront investment, making it more expensive than useful.
In the age of COVID-19, where cash is king and on-site resources are particularly limited, some IT departments are postponing data protection modernization, looking to simplify overall operations and lower infrastructure costs first. That plan can block a company's progress. While it's clear that traditional backup approaches are no longer enough, it's just as clear that businesses can't afford a strategy that doesn't keep costs in line, help accelerate processes, and improve business outcomes.
It's time for a more versatile, modern approach.
Modernizing data protection puts you in control of data—and costs
By taking a more modern approach, you don't have to choose between cost-effective operations and agile, scalable data protection. A strategy that thoughtfully augments your legacy infrastructure with new, more nimble technology can help reduce complexity, cost, and risk while accelerating your organization's time to value.
Modern data protection solutions have five key characteristics that help clients quickly back up and recover their data, as well as maximize the value of their backup data, all while reducing costs:
- Simplified operations: Modern solutions are simple to use and deploy, with automated policies, intuitive user interfaces, virtual deployments, and agentless options. Self-service solutions support multiple functions, reducing the burden on IT staff and the need for additional point solutions.
- Cloud agility: Cloud storage offers flexible capacity and supreme agility without additional capital investment. Cloud services scale up or down to meet unpredictable demands, and because data is stored and managed off site, your IT staff is freed up from operational tasks.
- Cost reduction: Costs have decreased significantly in recent years, primarily because solutions are more efficient and flexible. Combining elastic scaling and pay-as-you-consume models, new as-a-Service solutions align spend with business demands, helping to eliminate the financial burden and complexity of planning data protection infrastructure.
- Meeting demanding SLAs: Data protection service-level agreements are all about recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Newer technologies deliver faster, simpler, and more flexible recovery both on premises and in the cloud to meet even the most demanding SLAs.
- Maximized data value: Your backups can be more than an expensive insurance policy. Differentiated solutions offer the ability to quickly, simply, and securely access and reuse data in the backup repository for multiple business use cases, enabling lines of business and project teams to gain insights from that data.
Technology limitations should not dictate the way you protect data
Be wary of solutions that offer a rip-and-replace approach to data protection. These clean-sweep deployment methods typically mean the vendor doesn't support your current solution, which makes your transition challenging. An effective modernization solution should support both the current data protection workflows and processes and provide differentiated capabilities to change business outcomes, incenting a transition to any new platform.
It's time for an efficient IT organization to consider data protection as an as-a-Service offering. Consumption-based services improve efficiencies by simplifying operations, aligning infrastructure with actual use, and turning your backup data into an asset. Data protection delivered as a service meets demanding SLAs across a spectrum of RPOs and RTOs where compliance and retention are key. These services make backing up and recovering data effortless and automated, through a simple point-and-click experience and powerful APIs.
You can deploy cloud services, from rapid recovery to long-term retention, either locally (on premises) or in the cloud, depending on your business requirements.
- Local on-premises data protection service: Workloads and applications that require extremely low RTOs and RPOs can select an on-premises backup appliance delivered as a cloud service. On-demand protection eliminates upfront capital expenses, and predictable consumption-based billing aligns your cost to business value.
- Backup appliance hardware: This will integrate with leading backup solutions, enabling IT staff to use existing backup workflows and processes.
- Cloud data protection solution: Products such as HPE Cloud Volumes Backup lets you move your backup infrastructure to the cloud directly from any storage array and with your favorite backup software—without egress charges or cloud lock-in. Administrators can spin up storage capacity in the cloud in minutes and integrate existing data workflows without having to initialize, configure, manage, or tune any physical or virtual infrastructure. This enterprise cloud backup service supports any primary storage array and most backup software, unifying your backup infrastructure in the cloud. Because it is readily accessible, your backup data is transformed into a business asset. Administrators can restore workloads for multiple secondary use cases, including test/dev, reporting, and analytics.
Data protection as a service—edge to cloud
Modernizing data protection is key to keeping pace with today's changing hybrid cloud environments and ensuring data and applications achieve always-on availability. While your organization will have its own set of requirements, in general, you should focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, and future readiness when architecting your data protection strategy. New technologies can improve efficiencies by reducing cost, risk, and complexity in backup environments. Protecting your data on premises and in a distributed cloud environment will set you up to deliver on future SLAs, enabling you to meet demanding RPOs and RTOs and keep your business moving ahead.
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This article/content was written by the individual writer identified and does not necessarily reflect the view of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.
