The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization

Transcription

1 The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization

2 You have critical data scattered throughout your organization on back-office servers, desktops, mobile endpoints outside your firewall, and even in public clouds like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. What steps have you taken to ensure none of that critical data will be lost? If you are like many organizations, you have deployed a hodge-podge of heterogeneous data protection solutions over the years as new data sources were added. The result is that you now have an overall, organization-wide data protection system that is highly complex. Even worse, you really can t be certain that you don t have serious data protection gaps somewhere in your organization. You could maintain the status quo and hope disaster will not strike. But this white paper offers a better plan: a single, comprehensive data protection solution that gives you transparent visibility and complete control over all your corporate data sources. The Typical Evolution of Data Protection in an Organization People often put off buying life insurance until someone close to them passes away prematurely or a disaster strikes. Organizations approach data protection the same way: they often ignore protecting their data from loss until an unexpected data loss event occurs. Only then do they implement one or more point solutions specific to their most critical data sources. As time goes by, new data sources are added. Maybe new data protection point solutions are purchased for those new data sources, or maybe they are left unprotected. Either way, after a period of time, the organization is left with a complicated mix of data protection solutions and no easy way to confirm if all of its critical data is adequately protected from loss. No organization ever plans to get to this state of data protection complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Rather, it s a series of seemingly small decisions decisions that seemed good at the time that ultimately conspire to undermine an organization s ability to adequately and efficiently protect its data in a cost effective way. The Problems with Data Protection Point Solutions Issue #1: Point solutions are just that a solution, but only to a point Point solutions are designed for one or a small handful of specific data protection use cases, such as backing up the data on one particular vendor s brand of database, or only virtual machines. Point solutions may work very well for the use cases for which they were designed, but they are generally useless for other scenarios. For those other use cases, you need to spend vast amounts of time researching, evaluating, procuring, training on and deploying different data protection solutions. Issue #2: Point solutions are rarely unified Unless point data protection solutions come from the same vendor, it s unlikely they can be integrated or unified (and even then there are no guarantees). IT admins need to learn how to use different tools, will be less productive due to context switch between them, and deal with multiple vendors. Organizations might try to have different people specialize in different tools, but all it takes is a data loss event occurring while that one specialized recovery expert is on sick leave or vacation and they will wish knowledge had been more widely shared. Issue #3: Point solutions don t provide organization-wide transparency or control As a result of point #2, point solutions provide neither an organization-wide view nor organization-wide control of your data protection. It s like the old story of the elephant and the blind men, where each man touched a different part of the elephant and perceived something different than his peers. If you are unable to see a complete and coherent picture of all your organization s protected data sources and their protection status in real time, you can t tell if all of those data sources are being adequately protected.

3 White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive Issue #4: Point solutions protection levels are rarely consistent How Our Comprehensive Data Protection Works Better Technologies provided by different vendors will almost certainly offer different levels of protection. Even if the protection level is the same guaranteed recovery of lost data for example the recovery times will likely differ. This isn t necessarily a problem unless, for example, you have two data sources that are equally important to your organization but are being protected differently. Is the different treatment acceptable, or was a compromise made and one of the data sources is actually suffering from inadequate protection? Many organizations struggle with the complexities and inadequacies of data protection point solutions. The good news is there is a proven, effective way to comprehensively protect all of your organization s critical data sources, including: Issue #5: Point solutions are expensive Public SaaS-based applications like Salesforce, MS Office 365 or Google Apps Data protection point solutions often come with a lot of hidden direct costs, such as having to pay for add-on and complementary tools such as virtual machine replication, mobile device management and billing modules. In addition, each point solution will have its own license model by user, by device, or by processor core that may require you to buy more capacity than you need leading to unnecessary costs. And of course, by spending across multiple vendors, or even multiple solutions from the same vendor, you likely won t enjoy the kind of volume discount you would receive from a single data protection solution from a single vendor. Physical and virtual servers Databases Applications Mobile endpoints Public infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure Upgrading your organization s data protection solution to our solution provides this and more. We provide your organizationwide visibility into the status of all your protected data sources, so that you can be sure there are no protection gaps, or immediately identify them and take action. Customer LAN Emergency License Server Our Data Center VMWare Enterprise Apps DS-NOC Production DS-LIcense Server Databases Laptops Agentless DS-Client DS-System BLM Online Storage Archive Storage STATUS BAR BACKUP NOW RESTORE NOW BACKUP NOW SCHEDULE SCHEDULE EDIT SELECTION VIEW LOGS EDIT SELECTION RESTORE NOW VIEW LOGS DELETE FILES DELETE FILES How to use DS-Tablet How to use DS-Tablet Desktops Tablets & Smartphones DS-Billing Server Figure 1 Long View Cloud-based SaaS Apps th Avenue SW Calgary, Alberta T2P 3G6 Canada T: E: Cloud@lvs1.com W: Cloud-based Platforms

4 Figure 1 provides an architectural overview of how our solution protects your data. Two key points: Your corporate data sources, both inside and outside your firewall, are automatically and agentlessly backed up according to rules you define Each backup data set is encrypted, compressed, and de-duped before being sent to a secure data center of your choice off in the cloud (usually that data center is located remotely for disaster recovery purposes, but it could just as easily be your own on-site or off-site private or hybrid cloud) Although we offer a single comprehensive solution, it doesn t force one-size-fits-all protection on your data sources. Instead, you have full control and flexibility to set the level of protection that meets your organizational objectives, on a granular basis. For example, perhaps you want from your Sales department to be backed up daily, from all other departments to be backed up weekly, and production databases to be backed up hourly. You can easily establish such custom backup rules for these and any other data sources in your organization using our solution s dashboard (Figure 2). Figure 2 Another clear benefit of the single comprehensive data protection solution approach: your IT admin staff only needs to train on one data protection tool. While this helps reduce your costs and enables IT admin staff to become more efficient at day-to-day data protection tasks, the real advantage comes during a data loss event. It will be easier to find someone among your IT admin staff with the necessary recovery skills, and he or she will be highly knowledgeable in how to perform the recovery quickly.

5 Why our solution is the Best Choice for Comprehensive Data Protection Comprehensive data protection offers clear advantages over a point solution approach, but not all data protection solutions are the same. Here are six important considerations to evaluate: 1. Fair and flexible pricing With our solution, licensing costs are based on the total amount of data stored in your backup data vault, after compression and global deduplication, which can easily shrink your raw data size significantly, even for binary files. We also use Incremental Forever technology so only the first backup of a data source is fully stored in the backup data vault after that, backups are based on the delta between the current version of the data source and the state it was in when the last backup was taken. The result is that your licensing costs are a small fraction of what they would be with other vendors that charge based on raw data size. 2. Data security Under the US government HIPAA/HIGHTEC regulations, healthcare data such as patient records must be encrypted according to NIST FIPS standards to ensure the data is useless to anyone not authorized to access it. But many data protection solutions aren t NIST FIPS compliant, which means the organizations using those point solutions could face compliance severe penalties if audited. Our solution is fully NIST FIPS compliant, ensuring your data is always secure, both in transit and at rest in the backup data vault. 3. Built-in geo-location and remote data wipe for mobile devices Every day, thousands of mobile devices are lost or stolen. What if one of them has your corporate data on it? Built-in geo-location and remote data wipe functions can help keep it safe. The geo-location functionality in our solution lets you visually locate all of your protected mobile devices using an intuitive Google Maps interface (Figure 3), so you can judge at a glance whether a lost or stolen mobile device is in the wrong hands and with the click of a button, proactively delete your corporate data before an unauthorized person accesses it. Only data that has been previously backed up to our solution can be remotely wiped from the device, which helps organizations with BYOD policies retain full control over corporate data while leaving employee s personal data alone. Figure 3 4. Built-in virtual machine replication Our solution provides several options for protecting virtual machines, including: Point-in-time backups of virtual machines Recover the entire machine or individual files as needed Virtual machine replication for VMware without backup Snapshots of the source are replicated to one or more targets according to your schedule so that in the event of an outage, a replica VM up and running in as little as 5 minutes Virtual machine replication synchronized with point-in-time backups

6 5. Agentless architecture We do not use agents to protect data sources on your LAN. This provides three big benefits: 1. Less administration overhead for your IT admins because there is nothing to install, configure, or maintain on the data sources themselves 2. Backup agents won t compete for resources on the data source machines (e.g. a peak application load happens to coincide with a scheduled backup operation) 3. Better data security because you are not opening any ports for agents that could be compromised 6. Tiered recovery strategy for backup data In some instances, it s critical you keep backup data such as a legacy accounting system, data records and all for many years to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. Our solution makes it possible to minimize overall costs. You can set rules to automatically move old, rarely accessed backup data to less expensive storage options. In Conclusion Organizations often try to meet their data protection needs with a complicated mix of point solutions that in aggregate, don t optimally protect all of the organization s critical data. How an organization got there isn t important. What is critical is that the organization recognizes the inherent flaws with a data protection strategy based on point solutions and understand how the right comprehensive allin-one data protection solution can address those flaws. With our solution powered by Asigra, organizations benefit from an industrial-strength, award-winning, agentless data protection platform that is trusted by Fortune 500 companies around the world to protect their data, while providing 100% recovery assurance, lower costs and peace of mind. Contact us today to find our more about our comprehensive solution.