How cloud can be harnessed to enhance your data protection?

[BackupMikko]

Organizations are creating more and more data every day, which can have a significant impact on not only their production systems but also cascades into secondary systems such as backup and recovery. As businesses rethink their data protection strategies to accommodate vast data growth, they run into quite a few challenges:

• Recovery point objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) need to shrink thanks to ever-increasing demands for performance and uptime.
• Regulations are asking businesses to keep data for years while also requiring user data to be identifiable and/or potentially deleted.
• Disaster recovery initiatives need to be robust to ensure organizations are resilient.

These issues all conflict with ever-tightening IT budgets. Thankfully, the cloud can be a powerful solution to many of these challenges, especially when combined with a cloud-aware data protection solution like Veritas Backup Exec. Let’s explore how organizations can take advantage of the cloud to optimize their data protection strategy:

Cloud Long Term Retention

Data retention is a key factor when building a data protection strategy. Organizations have various reasons to keep data, though one of the most common is regulation. When your business is required to retain data for 7, 9, or even 15 years, storage costs quickly add up. Thanks to economies of scale, most public cloud vendors offer storage at competitive prices with storage tiers covering all key use-cases.

Backup Exec fits right into this equation with the ability to send data directly to cloud—or if you prefer having a local copy for quick restores—tiering to cloud later, which allows right-sizing storage cost to both retention and RTO needs. Backup Exec provides comprehensive cloud storage support for the major vendors to optimize costs per use case further.

Cloud Disaster Recovery

Planning for a disaster is a daunting task. While organizations want to be resilient in the face of hardship, they may not have the capital to invest in a full-blown disaster recovery site. Thankfully, the just-in-time nature of provisioning instances in the cloud can be a great substitute for an added datacenter. For example, Backup Exec integrates with Azure Site Recovery (ASR), a service dedicated to fulfilling the cloud failover scenario. Backup sets are replicated to ASR, and then recovery can be initiated and monitored from the Backup Exec console. With disaster recovery and data protection integrated, customers have a one-stop-shop for getting things up and running when “life happens”.

Protecting Cloud Data

Organizations have adopted cloud for more than just storage – testing, development, and even production have made their way into the public cloud. In these cases, data protection is just as important as it is on-premises. According to the Truth in Cloud report, over 85% of cloud architects and admins believe the cloud service providers are responsible for backup. Unfortunately, the responsibility for data protection still lies with customers, but solutions like Backup Exec have stepped up to ensure your data is safe. Backup Exec is available on both the AWS and Azure Marketplaces for easy deployment into your cloud environment.  

Backup Exec continues to deepen its partnership with cloud vendors – and we are constantly working to provide what matters most: a data protection solution that customers can rely on when it counts without breaking the bank. Like public cloud providers, we aim to lower the barrier of entry to enterprise-grade controls, feature-sets, and business outcomes.