Addressing most demanding service level agreements while minimizing infrastructure costs

Rules of data protection have changed to become an ever more complex game. Mega-trends such as information explosion, mobile and remote workforces, and increasingly stringent business SLAs are challenging business continuity. In addition security concerns become more relevant for the companies as they need to implement solutions that must help them to prevent, detect and respond in order to recover critical data to address their disaster recovery plans.

Critical business information is increasingly generated at multiple distributed sources requesting IT to cost effectively manage and protect data that is now everywhere. Read also "Data May be King, But Information is Imperative". Niche backup and recovery technologies are exposing foundational gaps concerning data protection and business continuity. These new business models and increased security requirements have forced organizations to rethink data protection strategies and implement solutions with global capabilities embedded.

In this article we will take a look into some of the current challenges and how to address each of them.

Challenge: explosive data growth and stringent recovery SLAs

As commented before, it is not a secret that data is growing at staggering volumes everywhere within the enterprise. This growing volume of information is forcing organizations to reconsider their strategy to ensure they’re aligned with the needs of the business. In today’s highly competitive, Always-On, 24x7 world, businesses can’t afford disruptions. In many situations, speed of application recovery defines the survivability of the business, therefore, IT is facing more stringent recovery SLAs.

However, some of the existing technologies have fallen short in meeting today´s business needs due to their limited integration capabilities, scalability, and poor performance. The cost of managing disparate and, in some cases, point solutions, adds complexity to the overall management, as well as increases operational expenses. See also "Reducing data costs without jeopardizing growth", McKinsey Digital, an article looking at managing data representing a large source of cost at most organizations.

Protect data and beat stringent backup and recovery SLAs

In modern IT world, many companies could have small or medium remote offices across the geography having only a fistful of servers that are not consistently protected due to different IT limits. However, the applications and data generated at the edge are equally important that the ones at the core, and must be protected.

Micro Focus Data Protector software provides a centralized management console to manage the enterprise wide data protection, from edge to data center using a single pane of glass, and built in enterprise capabilities.

In addition, Data Protector provides a huge and extensive support matrix to address the different systems and applications that customer environment may need to run their daily business operations. These functionalities allows customers to create an in-depth disaster recovery plan based on the different RPOs and RTOs required for the company´s business lines. As an additional embedded benefit, integrations can be deployed and monitored remotely, eliminating the need for specialized IT staff at remote locations, and therefore balancing cost versus business SLAs.

Challenge: Risk of data loss in diverse and global environments

Today, a lot of critical information is created and consumed at the remote office/branch office (ROBO) location level. A global office environment can have thousands of remote offices, small, medium and large, that need to be protected economically and reliably. The biggest data protection challenge in these environments is little or no IT expertise at remote sites, and backup operations are handled by non-IT staff—which is risky and error-prone. The conventional tape based solution is labor intensive, unsecure and unreliable. Adding IT resources is cost prohibitive and may not always be practical.

Unmatched global data protection

Although deduplication solved a number of pain points, many solutions in the market have several limitations including incompatible technology silos, restricted scalability and performance issues, untenable SLAs and backup failures, and distributed and complex management.

Micro Focus Data Protector, addresses previous limitations allowing deduplicate data anywhere—application source, backup server, or at the target appliance. In addition to previous deduplication integrations with HPE StoreOnce and Dell Data Domain appliances, Data Protector capabilities have been enhanced by adding a new software deduplication engine released within Data Protector 11.00.

This new functionality provide much more flexibility to customers that now are able to run deduplication across software and hardware, at remote sites, and in the data center. This means data can be restored faster by improving recovery SLAs, with simplified management and lower costs. It doesn´t matter which deduplication process is selected by the customer, Data Protector controls the entire backup operation, including data movement all around the organization.

Challenge: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disaster, whether it’s natural or man-made, can strike anytime, anywhere, and without warning. Recent cyber-attacks events are proof of that. Unfortunately, disaster recoveries are very hard to manage and often problems are not apparent until it’s too late. Protection against disaster is absolutely critical, and recovery speed matters to minimize the loss of productivity.

Having the data protected with the required RPO and RTO and in different media types and locations is a must nowadays, and will prevent customers to be impacted by any disaster or data breach.

Flexible Multi-Site Disaster Recovery

Data Protector is an enterprise class, highly scalable backup and recovery software solution that allows data to be backed up to multiple targets including disk, tape, or cloud either on site or off site. The solution controls the replication of data between the different devices, and applies asymmetric retention policies for more flexible disaster recovery deployments. Data Protector maintains tracking of data and allows data to be recovered from any site. Backup processes could be optimize to enable organizations to meet recovery SLAs and recover from catastrophic disaster quickly.

A faster restore at remote sites is made possible by retaining backup data longer on a local dedicated appliance, or on a Data Protector software store. Deduplication allows up to 20x more data to be stored locally for quicker restores. The automated and centrally managed restores simplify administration, and lowers costs.

On the other side, tape-based protection could be an alternative for specific policies and requirements, keeping company´s data in different media format and different sites, and fulfill the 3-2-1 backup rule.

This provides organizations with the flexibility to define multi-site disaster recovery plans—which was not possible before due to previous implemented solution limitations or cost and bandwidth limitations.

Challenge: Data protection complexity in Hybrid IT environments

Virtualization is an example of a disrupted technology, widely adopted by organizations some time ago, to drive more efficiency and cost savings in IT operations, but it has also created many challenges for data protection. But this is just an example about new Hybrid IT approaches to deploying related services (from on premise to cloud and from Physical to virtual) that have changed how we tackle the challenge of data protection in the new era.

Comprehensive Data Protection for Hybrid IT Environments

Data Protector has been protecting customers environments for more than 30 years, it doesn´t matter if we talk about manufacturing market, financial companies, healthcare organizations or government entities. Data Protector simplify application protection in Hybrid environments through unified recovery and advanced automation. Integration with 3^rd party storage and appliances offers tremendous cost savings in terms of storage efficiency.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this blog. Comment below.

The Micro Focus IM&G team

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