Data protection and governance requirements are something of a moving target for IT departments at the moment. Whether it’s trying to manage backups from multiple clouds, virtual machines, applications and databases, or endpoints or any combination of them, there’s a lot of moving parts to be considered. On top of that there’s the need to build backup into broader disaster recovery solutions, and the need to stay on top of general and industry-specific regulatory compliance.
In this blog we look at some of the challenges associated with balancing the competing demands for data protection, and put forward some solutions to solving them.
Clouding the issue…
With over 80% of modern companies using more than one cloud environment, the likelihood is that your organisation is already 
having to juggle backups from multiple clouds – or if not already then you’re likely to have to at some point in the future. It’s therefore crucial to ensure that your backup environment can support different public and private cloud backup requirements – this way you’ll have the flexibility to create a hybrid cloud backup environment that can backup and recover data to, within and between clouds.
Virtualisation
For all the many benefits of virtualisation, the creation and deployment of a virtual environment across public and private clouds can bring complexity when trying to run an effective backup and recovery strategy.
An effective and modern backup strategy is therefore one that facilitates backup, recovery and management across your virtual environment – this reduces the need for a complex and expensive set of point products and redundant infrastructure, the disbanding of data silos, and no more sprawl of virtual machines.
Applications and databases
One of the outcomes of having a sprawling mixture of databases and applications in your environment is the growing number of products required to protect them. An effective and modern backup strategy should therefore have the capacity to support a breadth and depth of distributed applications and databases – this enables the migration of different workloads to the cloud, efficient backup of databases, and fast access to and recovery of data, all in a single solution.
Are you reaching the endpoint?
The reality of the modern business is such that around 50% of data is held on laptops, desktops and mobile devices. And this isn’t just photos of events or datasheets, but is often important customer information and company intellectual property. Whether to prevent against lost or stolen devices or for more sinister situations such as a ransomware attack, it’s vital that any credible backup plan takes endpoints into account. An added benefit of a good backup and recovery service is that in the event that it’s needed, users can recover files to their own devices without the help (and therefore time) of IT.
How about disaster recovery?
As we’ve discussed at length, disaster recovery isn’t all about earthquakes and dramatic natural events – it also encompasses having the appropriate procedures in place for scenarios such as hardware failures, data breaches, or ransomware attacks.
The key to creating an appropriate disaster recovery plan for your organisation is remembering that not all data is equal – the trick is to balance recovery requirements and costs against how critical or sensitive the data is. So while recovery timeframes are intrinsically linked to the importance of the data, a single solution allows the complexity of managing this to be reduced.
