5 things to look for when looking for Intelligent Backup

Ramesh Mamgain

INDIA: Data loss and breaches are a real and frequent threat - now more than ever. In an age where information is considered the lifeblood of an organization, businesses are increasingly focusing on protecting information and ensuring its availability and recovery – nearly instantaneously. Businesses are rising quickly and failing fast. A major system downtime is all it takes to start a downward spiral.

Ensuring business continuity - while they face evolving threats to data security -requires intelligent data protection and information management solutions that go beyond traditional backup approaches. Vendors are no longer speaking with customers only about backup. Wait, that sounds counterintuitive for a market leader in backup, right? With the information environments we are dealing with today, our CIOs need to include more advanced capabilities such as deduplication for storage optimization, hypervisor and cloud portability, business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, and most of all, the ability to embrace new technologies quickly. Only then will businesses stay ahead of competition using technology.

Choosing the right data protection solution should start with looking at your IT environment holistically, rather than looking at a single point solution that addresses a small part of your data management lifecycle. There are five areas to consider when looking at your data protection and information management strategy:

1. Get Virtual – and it means so much more than a virtualised infrastructure

The first step to controlling ‘dark data’ is to be able to manage its sheer volume. According to the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel, 69 per cent of a company’s stored data has absolutely no value to the organization. So how do we find out the value that our data offers? A virtual repository that can bring all data together, de-duplicate it so you are dealing with a much more manageable size and run analysis and reporting to understand what data you have, should be the starting point for any data management strategy.

This will help your business grow and run optimally—even with ever-increasing volumes of data that stream in. Once you have all your data visible through this single console, you can apply automated archiving policies which will optimize the network and streamline processes. Additionally, a reusable, common repository facilitates better control of applications, processes and data workflow across an enterprise.

2. Intelligent Indexing

Indexing — in any context— guides any user to find data fast. An enterprise must index structured and unstructured information from a variety of sources such as file systems, intranets, document management systems, e-mail and databases. It becomes easy for a user to search for data in a ‘self-serve’ approach, making it faster to access information as required.

Further, enterprises can enforce security by providing limited-access control based on the employee’s role. Ultimately, indexing delivers information at your fingertips ensuring better productivity, improved collaboration and smarter decision-making that can transform your business.

3. Replication

Data replication is one of the effective ways of supporting an enterprise’s data protection requirements. Syncing your data across all applications, infrastructures and endpoints, and making it available will first and foremost provide a base level business continuity fallback if a failure occurs. Secondly, real-time sync can help you empower the business with instant access to data and the ability to activate information to drive value. With today’s technology, replication can be optimized with incremental snapshots of data, as frequent as every few minutes so that no matter what challenge comes up – systems downtime, ransom ware attach, application error – you will have a very recent copy that has been replicated elsewhere and is easily restored.

4. Built-in Automation

Automation is an obvious and paramount requirement for any enterprise solution today – it is no longer good enough to rely on manual processes which hinder the productivity of our teams. Automation of data management means user-defined policies run backups and archives without the need for heavy manual intervention. This frees administrators and enables them to focus on more strategic business challenges.

Moreover, by using user-defined policies such as file name, type, user, keyword, exchange classifications and tagging, your archive has the intelligence to keep only content with business value. This can reduce retention costs up to 70 per cent.

5. Access to Data

Once your enterprise data has been backed up, you need flexible restore capabilities that will match the needs of your business. Your backup solution must have the ability to provide near-continuous access to data after a disaster strikes, keeping your business productive. It must enable you to resume the use of an impacted server directly from the backup file without waiting for the production server to have a complete restore.

An optimal backup solution must provide a unified solution which integrates backup, replication, archiving and recovery in one. Let’s not forget that easy-to-use software solutions work well since employees from various non-tech domains also need access and management of their data.

It all starts with understanding the needs of the business, moving away from the conversation of reducing cost and risk, and instead focus on availability, transformation and innovation through your data.

(Ramesh Mamgain is Area Vice President (India and SAARC) at Commvault. Views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them)