FEATURE
management ecosystems, with many
businesses now exploring hybrid IT and
multi-cloud strategies, IT departments
have more plates to keep spinning than
ever before. This can also be seen as
a blessing.
In the age of the cloud, businesses are not
reliant on a single point of failure and can
create virtual backups to remote locations
for every packet of data they produce.
This has to be balanced against the privacy
protocols and value of certain data, as
well as considerations such as budgetary
constraints and business priorities.
To strike that balance, businesses can
ensure that data is available at all times
by having a robust cloud backup and
disaster recovery strategy in place. After
all, some data is more important to
backup than other data. Mission-critical
data and applications should be backed
up continuously. Unplanned downtime is
referred to as such because it can strike at
any time.
So, backups need to be running as and
when data is altered to ensure that the
fundamental information and systems on
which the business relies can be recovered
DATA VOLUMES
CONTINUE
TO GROW
EXPONENTIALLY,
AND THE PAST 12
MONTHS HAVE
SEEN PREVIOUSLY-
HYPED
TECHNOLOGIES
SUCH AS
CONTAINERS
AND IOT
BECOMING MORE
MAINSTREAM
WITH WIDESPREAD
ADOPTION.
38
Issue 03
to the state they were in when an outage
of fault occurs.
Solutions such as Backup-as-a-service
(BaaS) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-service
(DRaaS) provide continuous protection
to business continuity. Using op-ex based
pricing, the ‘x as a service’ model allows
businesses to pay for services based
on what they use, rather than making
restrictive capital investments up-front
which lead to IT wastage.
Crucially, organisations need to see
their backup and recovery services as
a fundamental part of their wider data
management and cloud strategy. Veeam
Availability Suite provides a holistic solution
for backup and replication to the cloud and
disaster recovery, delivering availability
across all workloads – virtual, physical and
cloud – from a single management console.
Awareness of the value of data is on the up,
so IT managers should take a moment to
reflect whether their backup and recovery
strategy is fit for purpose and in line with
their business continuity needs. Given that
the demands on data availability in the
digital business continue to evolve, having
a future-proofed infrastructure is a must for
modern enterprises.
Adrian Moir, Senior Consultant,
Product Management, Quest
While individual users may still need
reminding to backup their files, we’re at
a point in 2019 where most businesses
have seen the impact of ransomware
or data loss, often first hand, and
understand the importance of backing up
business critical data.
The real problem we see all too often
though is that organisational backup
strategies aren’t evolving quickly
enough. Data volumes continue to grow
exponentially and the past 12 months have
seen previously-hyped technologies such
as containers and IoT becoming more
mainstream with widespread adoption.
With this new structure of an organisation’s
computing assets and new types of data
needing to be protected, it is no longer a
case of just backing up everything in the
same way. There is no ‘one size fits all’
Adrian Moir, Senior Consultant, Product
Management, Quest
when it comes to backup and businesses
need to take a smarter approach.
Customers and employees continue to
demand seamless access to data and
internal stakeholders want the business to
achieve this while being cost-conscious.
Therefore, businesses need to take a long
hard look at their current backup strategy
and decide whether it can not only ensure
the level of service internally and externally
in the event of a disaster, but that it is as
streamlined as possible and able to keep up
with the scale of growing data volumes.
If businesses could take one thing into
consideration following this year’s World
Backup Day, it should be a fundamental
switch in thinking. Don’t view backup as
an afterthought. Build comprehensive data
protection into every new development in
the business.
This concept of data protection by design
is far more than simply a ‘nice to have’,
it’s a ‘must have’ and a fundamental
stipulation of the EU’s GDPR.
GDPR is also famously broad when it
comes to the definition of a data breach,
including any incident which affects the
availability of personal data; incidents
which can be mitigated by a robust
backup and recovery strategy.
With data holding so much value to
businesses and individuals alike, the
way it is handled can make or break an
organisation in 2019. ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com