Data protection leads enterprises to operational excellence

Usha Prasad

BANGALORE, INDIA: With enterprises storing huge volumes of data, real-time data protection is a critical aspect for any business. Enterprises cannot afford to lose important data. Data loss can have far-reaching and costly consequences for enterprises in all segments. Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Symantec Corporation, Elaborates on the need for data protection and on Symantec's NetBackup solution in an exclusive interview with CIOL.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Your views on the need for data protection among enterprises?
Anand Naik: Businesses are struggling to manage and scale their backup infrastructures and at the same time increase data availability. It is not surprising then that data protection is emerging as one of the most critical aspects of the IT department's mission today. The exponential growth of data year-over-year against a backdrop of increasing threats to the enterprise, along with the recently imposed regulatory requirements for data retention and availability has fuelled this need.

CIOL: Elaborate on Symantec's NetBackup?
AN: NetBackup features capabilities that allow users to take full advantage of
next-generation data protection through -

• Data Deduplication
• Disk backup
• Deep integration with intelligent backup appliances

Many enterprises are interested in deploying next-generation data protection technologies, but have been reluctant to do so because of the complexity introduced by numerous disparate point products - each with their own agents, policies, schedulers, recovery processes, user interfaces and reporting tools. With the NetBackup platform, enterprises get the best of both worlds: unprecedented choice and flexibility to select best-of-breed technologies in replication, snapshots, CDP, data deduplication, encryption, virtual tape and traditional tape - either from Symantec or leading third-party storage vendors.

In addition, the NetBackup platform provides a single tool to manage all these various vendors and technologies, which means a single approach to agents, policy management, recovery processes, security, backup reporting and the data catalog.

CIOL: How can NetBackup lead an enterprise to operational excellence - in terms of storage utilization and DR plans?
AN:Symantec's next generation data protection technology, NetBackup, helps enterprises improve storage utilization and enable more flexible disaster-recovery plans in multi-vendor storage environments. NetBackup features capabilities like continuous data protection that helps capture backups of data the moment a file is saved. This ensures that organizations can recover the most recent version of a file in the event of a disaster or data loss and organizations can completely eliminate backup windows. While regularly scheduled backups protect against many types of data loss, backup provides only one layer of availability that businesses need to prevent downtime.

NetBackup software's disk-based data protection solutions offer near instant data recovery while improving backup performance and reducing exposure to data loss. NetBackup helps organizations transcend the limitations of traditional tape-based backup and recovery to take advantage of the following benefits:

Performance - Leverage random access disk capabilities while eliminating the mounting
and positioning delays. Enable disk-based snapshots for instant, low impact protection.
Availability - Online, always available storage. Demanding operations no longer have to
wait in line for resources. Backups, restores, and duplications can be performed simultaneously.
Management - Reduce media management complexities, while enabling flexible scheduling and configurations. Proactively manage disk capacity with high / low watermarks and thresholds

CIOL: Are Indian enterprises liberal in spending on such IT implementations in the interest of securing data, which in turn secures their business?
AN: As Indian enterprises expand their business overseas, compliance regulations come into place that requires companies to implement data protection solutions. As this realization is dawning, Indian enterprises are steadily coming at par with global enterprises in terms of securing their mission critical data and in turn securing their business. However, there is still a huge scope for greater implementation of data protection solutions across industries.

As the leader in data protection, Symantec protects more than half of the world’s business data and provides complete enterprise data protection across virtual environments, remote offices, desktops, laptops, servers, applications and databases. Symantec also offers comprehensive solutions for disk-based backup and delivers market-leading recovery capabilities. 

India Data Protection and Recovery software market in 2007 was USD 18.7 million and estimated to reach USD 55.8 million by 2012. (Source: IDC Asia/Pacific Semiannual Infrastructure Management Software Tracker, 1H08, May 2008).