cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Forecast: Backup Exec with Increasing Cloudiness

Andy_Spencer
Level 2
Employee

Public, private, hybrid? Upload and download speeds, latency and retrieval costs? To-the-cloud, in-the-cloud, from-the-cloud? IT pros are burdened with the responsibility of choice. Many roads lead to the Emerald City of operational cost reduction and performance optimization. And we marketing weenies don't make it any easier. The famous pizza as a service chart is a shining counter-example in a world of complex obfuscation.

Let me try what we’ve always focused on with Backup Exec: a simpler approach. The timeless 3-2-1 backup rule says we should keep three copies of our critical data: two on separate local media and one off-site. Local backups are quite often written to dedicated disk, whether direct-attach USB, SAS or SAN, or over the local network to shared NAS. And many companies still write to tape, there’s no shame in that.

The first step is to get copies 1 and 2 onto different media. Here’s where Backup Exec shines with one of the most comprehensive compatibility lists in the known galaxy. Having choice is a good thing, as your backup solution shouldn’t dictate your hardware choices. Got an extra disk array gathering dust? As long as you’re confident in its reliability, use it for backups. Extra space on the NAS? Need to write to tape for compliance? Veritas tests compatibility so you don’t have to.

Copies 1 and 2, check. Quo vadis copy 3?

With available internet bandwidth rising about 400% in the past five years, and public cloud storage becoming less and less expensive, the obvious choice is cloud. Have your backup solution write that third copy directly to-the-cloud via a public storage service. Veritas is glad to help: we’ve been providing direct write capability since version 15. Our users have earned great operational and capital savings by writing hundreds of terabytes to public cloud services.

But which one? The three giants are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The choice is yours, and there is no additional license cost. Backup Exec supports direct write to Azure, AWS and Google via built-in connectors. Most geographies are supported, so you can specify exactly where the data is written to. And your data is secure: military-grade 256-bit AES encryption guards the contents in storage containers, and TLS connections protect the data in flight.

Got it? 3-2-1? Next up: configuring and using your cloud backups.