Gaining the most from your next-generation data protection

Data protection processes and technologies have undoubtedly grown in leaps and bounds, maturing to accommodate increasingly complex and challenging corporate data environments.

Today, there are a number of next-generation data protection solutions that offer centralised and importantly end-to-end management for heterogeneous environments. However, in order to understand the abovementioned sophistication, one also has to come to grips with today’s data protection challenges.

There are a currently a number of factors that contribute to the massive growth in organisational data. For one, due to the economic climate which in turn has led to a number of company mergers; IT teams now have to implement new disaster recovery strategies, protect satellite data centres and deal with the organic growth of their own infrastructures.

Additionally, existing applications demand more availability and speed of recovery in response to competitive and regulatory pressures. Offline applications such as supply chain management (SCM) are being brought online, and revenue-generating applications in healthcare, online financial services, retail, and other markets are introduced constantly.

The reality is with these advances in technology and industry come the resultant increase in digital data assets which only adds to an already pressurised IT support structure.

Additionally, the challenge of protecting so much information is compounded by the growing complexity of the infrastructure itself. Companies now have to ensure that their valuable data is backed up and archived over multiple geographic sites and remote offices.

Even within a single data centre, technologies feature their own user interfaces (UI), policies, agents, and reporting tools that add to administration headaches

Critical applications also demand higher recovery point objectives (RPO) and shorter recovery time objective (RTO) while transaction processing applications demand ever more granular recovery points. Plus if you add into the mix government and industry regulations, it feels like a never-ending snowball effect.

And all these challenges must be met using staff, infrastructure, and financial resources shared with other urgent and business-critical applications and processes.

Fortunately, new technologies have emerged to provide a solution to the above. These technologies include:

. Disk backup and virtual tape libraries (VTL) that enhance or
replace classic tape backup to take full advantage of disk performance advantages and improving economics; Space-saving snapshots and continuous data protection (CDP) solutions that promise higher performance at reasonable cost for intermediate-priority applications; Data de-duplication that cuts network and storage costs dramatically, for backup of remote sites as well as systems in the data centre; and Off-host snapshots and replication that use point-in-time copies, which are then backed up to cut RPO exposure and disaster recovery risks.

However, with sophisticated technology come management challenges. These solutions require multiple supporting technologies in the form of agents on managed servers that compromise server and network performance, and require administrative effort to install and maintain. For example, the processes required to manage virtual tape libraries are radically different from those needed for snapshots.

The answer is to opt for an integrated solution that offers next-generation coupled with advanced management capabilities. Again, there are solutions available that adhere to these needs by for example offering centralised management from end-to-end of the backup environment, including both disk and tape.

Finding the right solutions that offer all the advanced technologies with the necessary management functionality might just be what organisations need to finally put a stop to their data protection woes. However, choose wisely and ensure that you don’t add to your complexity as opposed to solving it.