It’s Time For Enterprises To Insure Their Data

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It’s Time For Enterprises To Insure Their Data
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Data lies at the heart of every organization, and they are generating more data today than ever before. With the data pile rising to massive heights, it becomes imperative for organizations to employ the best protection tools for safeguarding their data. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Even with the most reliable equipment, there is always a possibility of losing data which could be of extreme importance to your organization.

Despite rapid technological advancements, data backup still remains a problem for organizations across business verticals. Traditional backup solutions are incapable of protecting data of huge volume and needs of the modern day business. Since backup did not evolve with the rest of IT, there are many enterprises who still use obsolete backup strategies, which is certainly posing a threat to their business.

In the Age of Modern-Day Applications
Application needs have drastically changed from what it was to what it is today. This has resulted in a wide disconnect between IT backup administrators and what’s expected of them, and the expectations of application owners. As soon as Exchange goes down, everyone knows it, and the Exchange admin has a sense of immediate urgency that a traditional backup strategy often doesn’t share. This gulf between the application owners and what they’re held to, and what IT is held to, has a massive impact on the organization.

Application owners address these issues in either of the two ways and both would impact the organization in a negative way. In the first scenario, application owners go around the backup team and implement their own recovery solution. This approach results in generating multiple copies of the data which means running, managing and administrating several tools becomes a challenge. It is estimated that almost 60% of today’s data is generated from the copied data that is floating in the organization. Additionally, the silo-approach leads to abstruseness in finding out the most current version of data which the owner might want to use.
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Another scenario is when the application owner complies with and allows IT to decide the backup strategy. This approach results in slackening the organization’s ability to quickly restore applications in the event of an outage.

Adopt a Proactive Approach
Enterprises usually find renewing previous year’s backup product license easier than coming up with an absolute new and better approach. While doing this, what they don’t realize is that you cannot protect your valuable data with a century old backup strategy. They need to revamp and keep implementing better and latest solutions in order to ensure better protection of their data. When you use a value-add recovery solution, you create business resiliency. The extra value comes from being able to use the data in a variety of ways because you can back it up with context. You can open it up and use it, and work from real live data.

Stop Just Backing Up: Follow These Five Steps
Organizations who wish to streamline their backup strategy and leverage data for true business value should not focus on just backing up, rather, on delivering true business resiliency. Turn backup into a proactive activity that delivers extra value and lets the organization use data in various different ways. Below are a set of best practices to achieve true business resiliency:

1. Remembering the basics of backup is something that you cannot afford to forget while modernizing your strategy. For this, ensure you've broad application coverage. With multiple apps exploding throughout the data center, it is imperative for organizations to have the right tools and the right strategy for them to cover applications they need to protect.
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2. Tiered recovery approach is always preferred as it is important for organizations to define which systems are mission critical and which are business critical. This further helps them in assigning the most apposite backup technology to each one. Locate the applications that have short SLAs and are highly visible, and make sure the protection you have in place is based on recovery requirements.

3. This is the stage where you need to stop just backing up the data. Data alone doesn't have any context without the application which made it. This means you need to have backup tools that are able to provide a complete image view of data and the application, so that at the time of restoring, you would know the context of where it came from.

4. Another key point to remember is merging replication and backup into one. Gone are the days when these two were treated as non-integrated tasks. Today, in order to be able to move data where you need it and when you need it, better control over efficient and complex replication tasks is extremely important to have.

5. It's also essential to be cognizant of cloud applications. With more and more cloud applications coming in you may need tools that are capable of incorporating those applications. Yesterday’s world backs up everything within IT control, but cloud apps aren’t controlled by IT. You want something that enables cloud and understands it, and can protect it in the same way you protect on-premises apps.

Backup: Unlock the True Value
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These steps, if taken, help your organization in several ways. You are not only able to reduce the downtime, meet SLAs, and protect your organization in true sense, but also take backup to the next level. When your data is backed up within the context of applications in which it resides, extra copies of the data available create that additional value for the organization as it can now be used in various ways. You can either use it as a test resource, convert data from physical to virtual or physical to cloud, or it can even be leveraged to run analytics on it without affecting the production system. These are the ways which add value to your organization and also provide true resiliency to your business.

Author: Murli Mohan, General Manager, Dell Software