5 Must-Have Features of Backup as a Service For Hybrid Environments

As the value and business criticality of data increases, so do the challenges of backup, recovery, and data management. These challenges are exacerbated by exploding data growth, increasing SLA requirements, and an evolving threat and compliance landscape. Although hybrid cloud environments provide businesses with greater agility, protecting and managing apps and data across the core data center, private cloud, and public cloud can prove increasingly complex and costly. 

Many IT organizations that have cobbled together data protection solutions over the years now find themselves saddled with rigid, siloed infrastructure based on an equally rigid backup approach. Organizations that postpone modernization complain about being stuck in maintenance mode with disparate, multi-vendor backup and recovery systems that are complex and expensive to maintain. Multiple touch points of administration slow down production, and the costs of software licensing, disruptive upgrades, and over-provisioning can add up fast. Resources are tight – but not protecting business-critical data and apps can jeopardize the health of the business.

This situation presents a challenge for IT organizations to find a solution that simply and reliably safeguards your most important and valuable assets. Modern cloud services are designed to do a better job protecting data and apps in hybrid cloud environments, and to simplify operations and keep costs down.

Architecting your modern data protection strategy

When it comes to data protection modernization, most businesses realize they cannot afford to wait. According to ESG, 57% of organizations expect to increase spending on data protection in 2022, and 26% identify data backup and recovery as a top-5 area of data center modernization planned for the next 12 to 18 months. 

If you are considering the transition to data protection as a service (DPaaS), you’re not alone. Recent research indicates the importance of these emerging services in cloud-centric strategies. According to IDC, DPaaS is the fastest-growing segment of the data protection market with forecast 19.1% CAGR through 2025.

In large part, that’s because cloud services improve efficiencies by reducing cost, risk, and complexity. Protecting data on premises and in a hybrid cloud environment sets you up to deliver on future SLAs, enabling you to meet demanding RPOs and RTOs – while keeping your business moving ahead.

New backup as a service offerings have redefined backup and recovery with the simplicity and flexibility of the cloud experience. Cloud-native services can eliminate complexity of protecting your data and free you from the day-to-day hassles of managing the backup infrastructure. The innovative approach to backup lets you meet SLAs in hybrid cloud environments, and simplifies your infrastructure, driving significant value for your organization.

Backup as a service for hybrid cloud

Resilient data protection is key to always-on availability for data and applications in today’s changing hybrid cloud environments. While every organization has its own set of requirements, I would advise you to focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, performance, scalability, and future-readiness when architecting your strategy and evaluating new technologies. The simplest choice: A backup as a service solution that integrates all of these features in a pay-as-you-go consumption model.

Modern solutions are architected to support today’s challenging IT environments. Introduced in September 2021 as a part of HPE GreenLake for data protection, HPE Backup and Recovery Service is designed to deliver five key benefits to hybrid cloud environments:

1. Cloud simplicity. Simplicity should be at the top of your list for an as-a-service data protection offering. Traditional backup approaches are notorious for their complexity, requiring several separate backup tools to manage operations in the hybrid cloud. This fragmented approach inhibits innovation, because so much time and energy are diverted into configuring, initializing, and managing separate operating systems, and establishing best practices for each.

   HPE Backup and Recovery Service brings the simplicity of the cloud experience to on-prem and cloud environments. This service breaks down the silos of a typical backup deployment, supporting any primary storage array to protect your VMware virtual machines (VMs), and there’s no need to manage backup hardware, software, or cloud infrastructure. The solution can be deployed quickly and managed very simply through a single console. Policy driven, the HPE Backup and Recovery Service easily organizes VMs into protection groups, making it easy to apply policies to multiple VMs or datastores and to automate protection at scale.

2. Flexibility. Every business has its own unique data protection needs, and it can be a stretch addressing those needs with legacy solutions. Flexibility and scalability are core tenets of HPE data protection solutions, architected to provide options that can meet all your RTO and RPO requirements, whether you want instant restores via snapshots, rapid recovery on-premises, or backup to the cloud for long term data retention.
3. Agility at speed. Any hybrid cloud data protection solution must be agile, providing fast restores, rapid recoveries on-prem, and robust protection that can be enabled in minutes. HPE Backup and Recovery Service allows you to easily manage your backup and recovery operations with a single SaaS console, you can spin up storage capacity in minutes, and start backing up your data with just a few clicks.
4. Storage efficiency. Elastic scale and dedupe and compression technologies work together to make as-a-service data protection offerings efficient, and to lower storage and network bandwidth cost on-prem and in the cloud. HPE Backup and Recovery Service is built on proven HPE StoreOnce Catalyst technology, which provides highly space-efficient backups and network usage. In fact, the HPE solution delivers superior storage efficiency as compared to alternate VMware backup solutions.
5. Cost optimization. Pay per use services eliminate upfront capex expense with predictable, transparent consumption-based billing aligned to actual usage. Unlike other public cloud services, HPE does not charge additionally for data restore (egress), backup (ingress), search, and management of cloud storage.

Ransomware protection is a must

No modern data security solution is complete without ransomware protection. The most effective way to protect backup data from cyberattacks is to keep it hidden from attackers. Ransomware can’t infect and encrypt what it cannot access.

HPE Backup and Recovery Service creates backup stores which are not directly accessible by the operating system. Backup images are made inaccessible to ransomware, ensuring data backup security, and enabling reliable data restores. And with backup data immutability, users can also prevent a backup being inadvertently or maliciously deleted or modified before the configured retention date. Once the retention/immutability date has been set it cannot be reduced, and the backup is safe from attack or accidental deletion.

A quick demo – and a test drive

Data is the lifeblood of your organization. Data protection modernization provides your organization with an opportunity to:

• Simplify backup and recovery operations to make it easier to protect data across every SLA
• Effectively protect data from ransomware attacks, while complying with data protection regulations
• Align infrastructure to actual use to optimize use of resources and avoid costly overprovisioning

Get the peace of mind that your data is rapidly recoverable, always secure, and provides value to your business without compromise with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service. See how it works in this 4-minute demo.

You can also register for a 90-day free trial of the HPE Backup and Recovery Service.* All features of the cloud service are available during the trial period and after evaluation, with HPE support.

*Cloud storage capacity is fixed at 5 TB during the trial period.

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About Ashwin Shetty

Ashwin Shetty is a Product Marketing Manager for HPE Storage. In this role, Ashwin is responsible for helping customers understand the value of modernizing data protection with HPE Backup and Recovery Service, HPE StoreOnce, HPE RMC, and HPE StoreEver Tape. Prior to joining HPE, Ashwin worked in the sales and marketing groups of Oracle and HCL.