Managed Backup A Strategic Network Consulting white paper

Transcription

1 Managed Backup A Strategic Network Consulting white paper

2 2 Managed Backup Executive Summary Businesses survive disasters only if their data survives. But many business owners are so busy running day-to-day operations that they don t dedicate time to prepare for hypothetical events that could impact operations. Given the relative scarcity of major disasters and the potential cost of traditional business continuity solutions, organizations commonly prioritize disaster planning right out of the budget. However, it s not just large-scale disasters that can cause businesses to close. Unpredictable events such as application failures, viruses, power outages, fires and even plumbing leaks are far more likely to cause major disruptions. When critical data is lost, organizations expend valuable time and resources in an attempt to recover that information if it can be recovered at all. What s more, it is becoming substantially more difficult to adequately ensure the protection of information assets in today s business environment. Business-critical data is growing at a breathtaking rate, and organizations have more platforms, applications, servers, virtual machines and databases to protect than ever before. In its 2011 Digital Universe study, technology research firm IDC forecasts that by 2020 organizations will own 50 times more information than they have today, and will require 10 times as many physical and virtual servers to deal with it all. Strategic Network Consulting (SNC) offers a variety of alternatives designed to help customers become more resilient and less susceptible to downtime. Shifting discrete IT functions such as backup and recovery to SNC ensures 24x7 availability and enables customers to focus on more strategic initiatives, fulfill compliance requirements and mitigate their overall IT risk. SNC s Managed Backup portfolio includes onsite, offsite and cloud-based backup and storage options that transfer the burdens of maintaining and managing traditional on-premises storage, servers, backup and disaster recovery to our highly trained and experienced engineers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SNC ensures that critical data is secure and can be quickly restored if needed, while eliminating the costs of hardware, media, maintenance and human capital.

3 Strategic Network Consulting 3 Flexible and Scalable Storage There is no doubt that the increasingly complex nature of today s IT systems requires resources and expenditures that can distract from an organization s core business focus. That is particularly true when it comes to the relentless growth of stored data and server proliferation. Industry studies show that once all the costs are included, in-house storage is at least five times more expensive to own and run per gigabyte than hosted, cloud-based storage. SNC provides a far more flexible, scalable and cost-effective alternative. Our onsite, offsite and cloud-based solutions allow you to create an on-demand data infrastructure that eliminates the common and costly practice of over-provisioning storage to meet a theoretical peak demand. You only pay for the usable capacity you need. With a pay-as-you-go model, customers can scale their storage usage up or down as needed, without having to continually grow farms of storage networks and servers. By shifting the capital expense and maintenance of IT assets to SNC, customers take advantage of economies of scale by gaining access to our hardware, applications, bandwidth and skill sets. RTO & RPO RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is a metric referring to the amount of data at risk. It is determined by the amount of time between data protection events and reflects the amount of data that potentially could be lost during disaster recovery. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is a metric referring to the amount of time it takes to recover from a data loss event and how long it takes to return to service. RTO refers then to the amount of time the system's data is unavailable or inaccessible preventing normal service. What s more, SNC s cloud-based storage platform makes organizations prepared for disaster. In a recent study of organizations with formal disaster recovery programs, the Aberdeen tech research firm discovered that organizations that had moved at least part of their data storage to the cloud recovered from downtime events almost four times faster than those with no formal cloud storage program. In addition, users of cloud storage met their recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) more often than those storing their data inhouse, and saw larger year-over-year improvements in the time needed to recover from disaster or downtime. Efficient Backup & Archiving Backup and recovery operations have become increasingly complex and problematic. In a recent survey of over 400 IT professionals, more than 40 percent reported that their backup times exceed 24 hours. In essence, they are producing data faster than they can back it up. Even worse, studies show that up to 50 percent of all backups are not fully recoverable. That means organizations are spending extraordinary amounts of capital and manpower on processes that are decidedly unreliable. SNC s Managed Backup allows customers to simply and safely store all critical data while cutting the costs and administration overhead involved with the man-

4 4 Managed Backup agement of traditional backup systems. This frees up critical IT resources that can be diverted to projects focused on growth and core competencies. SNC s solution includes onsite backup to a local NAS device for complete images of servers, workstations and laptops. Incremental backups occur as often as every 15 minutes. This local copy provides rapid restoration of individual files or systems, while another copy is maintained offsite in case of a data center disaster. In addition, critical data backup can be replicated over the customer s existing network to SNC s offsite data vault. SNC s offsite data vault is maintained in a Tier IV co-location facility that is SAS-70 Type II certified. The backup platform is FIPS certified and all data is private-key encrypted with AES256 ciphers. If a server fails, data can be rapidly transferred from the backup site to meet the organization s RTO and RPO. Data is de-duplicated and compressed locally, and only changes are replicated offsite. The architecture streamlines the backup environment and provides support for virtualization. As a result, SNC is able to resolve many of the challenges associated with traditional data backup while maximizing security and cost-efficiency. SNC consults with each customer to determine the best backup strategy to meet the customer s business requirements. Backup jobs can be run nightly or at more frequent intervals the backup platform supports continuous data protection. Retention rules simplify data retention policies by focusing on what needs to be recoverable. Disaster Preparedness When he once was questioned about an opponent s strategy for an upcoming fight, former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson famously remarked: Everybody has a plan until they get hit. The sentiment is also unfortunately true for many organizations and their disaster recovery (DR) planning. There is nothing like an actual crisis to expose the weaknesses of a plan. Traditional DR solutions are slow and prone to failures because they involve many manual and complex steps, are difficult to test and require expensive duplication of the production data center infrastructure to ensure reliable recovery. As a result, organizations find themselves unable to provide sufficient disaster protection for more than a small subset of their production systems. SNC s cloud option provides a far more reliable solution. This solution leverages customers existing network resources to distribute data across multiple nodes with SNC s cloud provider partners for full offsite server and application recovery. By providing the storage system, file or block system and all applications necessary for backup, archiving and disaster recovery, customers can access their data from anywhere with a secure internet connection.

5 Strategic Network Consulting 5 Conclusion The massive amounts of data being produced by a new generation of systems and applications are outstripping the capacity of the typical organization s storage infrastructure. This growth not only strains an organization s hardware capacity, but creates extreme challenges for data security, availability, system performance and connectivity architecture. In addition to the ongoing management costs, runaway data growth also creates significant opportunity costs. According to a recent Wakefield Research survey, 93 percent of IT managers surveyed reported that cost considerations routinely keep them from utilizing optimal IT solutions. Cost-conscious companies report being handicapped by unreliable and out-ofdate hardware. While SNC can serve as a valuable extension of existing in-house storage solutions, that only scratches the surface of the possibilities. By leveraging the cloud, SNC can serve not only as the primary data storage for day-to-day operations, but also as a reliable and cost-effective backup and recovery platform and the key component in a sophisticated disaster recovery plan. By delivering such benefits simply and efficiently, SNC can help customers reduce the money and manpower they devote to traditional storage infrastructures and divert those resources to more business-focused endeavors.

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