Don’t Bet Your Data on a Thin Veneer of Protection

Most people wouldn’t consider diving in a flimsy cage near an aggressive shark. After all, a strong cage is an essential part of that experience. When you know you’ll be swimming in chummed waters, the quality of the cage’s design and construction suddenly becomes crucial — and the open ocean is not the place to make your safety checks.

Enterprise data is no different. In a world full of cyber threats, running a business is difficult enough without taking unnecessary risks. Much like the diver’s cage, the IT infrastructure you choose can make a critical difference in data protection. How well-protected is your data? And how quickly can you restore things to normal should something go wrong? You need to answer these questions now, before your defenses are breached.

If your IT organization is like most, you’ve been accumulating data protection solutions over the years. Now you find yourself saddled with rigid, siloed infrastructure based on an equally rigid backup strategy. If it feels like inadequate protection, that’s because it is. You’re constantly 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 capacity over-provisioning add up fast.

Hybrid cloud multiplies your challenges

As your organization leverages the cloud to grow your business, you start generating volumes of production data that must be efficiently protected as you scale. But protecting and managing apps and data in a hybrid cloud can prove even more complex and costly than legacy on-prem solutions. You need to deal with:

• Growing cyberthreats. Ever-increasing ransomware attacks affect every industry. With data distributed across multiple locations on-premises and in the cloud, IT leaders need a solution to effectively protect their data against ransomware and malware threats.
• Siloed data. Data that is difficult to access increases cost and risk while lowering efficiency. With the proliferation of data infrastructure, data is increasingly likely to be siloed by location, owner, data type, management platform, and more. IDC finds that companies on average must manage and protect 14-20 different data silos. This level of complexity severely inhibits the innovation and business value that data offers — while increasing IT expense, risk of attack, and potential data loss. In response, IT leaders need platforms to unify data and eliminate siloed infrastructure.
• Inconsistent protection policies. Data protection across on-premises and cloud tends to be inconsistently enforced and complex to manage. Often, there are no common protection policies, creating a corresponding increase in risk for your data. IT leaders need a solution that unifies management across hybrid cloud.

Backup as a service solves many challenges

Agile, resilient data protection is key to always-on availability for data and applications in today’s dynamic hybrid cloud environments. While every organization has its own set of requirements, almost all focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, performance, scalability, and future-readiness when architecting a data protection strategy and evaluating new technologies. These days, you can solve for all these criteria with a pay-as-you-go, backup as a service solution.

Modern backup as a service solutions are designed to support today’s challenging IT environments by delivering five key benefits:

1. 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 multiple backup tools to manage operations across hybrid cloud. This fragmented approach inhibits innovation because you must divert time and energy to configuring, initializing, and managing separate operating systems and establishing best practices.
2. Consistent protection. You should be able to deploy your solution quickly and manage it simply via a single console. Global protection policy and automation help to ensure consistent protection for your on-prem and cloud workloads. Users can visualize multiple VMs, data stores, or cloud native workloads from a single dashboard; this allows execution of backup and recovery for operations and applies appropriate protection when required.
3. Meeting RTO/RPO requirements. A modern backup and recovery service leverages consumption-based pricing and efficient data mobility to eliminate complexity and free customers from the day-to-day hassles and operational costs of backup infrastructure. And it’s flexible: customers should be able to restore instantly using snapshots or recover workloads rapidly on-premises and leverage the cloud for long-term, cost-effective data retention.
4. High efficiency. Space-efficient backups deliver better storage economics as compared to alternate backup solutions. Your backup data should be stored in a compressed, de-duplicated format that helps to drive down the cost of long-term retention and reduce backup storage costs. Additional storage efficiency benefits include:
   • Reduced network bandwidth costs
   • Efficient data transfers and faster backup completion using only incremental changes
   • Faster restores using only missing blocks from the cloud store for recovery
   • Increased capacity with predictable costs and cloud scale
5. Comprehensive data management. The most advanced backup as a service solutions integrate with comprehensive cloud data services offerings to orchestrate compute, provision storage resources, configure networking, and protect workloads with a unified experience. This creates a single, company-wide data management strategy that breaks down data silos and complexity with self-service agility and a cloud operational experience everywhere.

Protection against ransomware

For virtually every company, the question is not if, but when, a ransomware attack will occur. We’ve looked at this issue in detail, but the key takeaway is that IT leaders need a robust data protection solution to effectively counter this metastasizing threat.

Leading backup as a service solutions efficiently protect backup data from cyberattacks like ransomware by keeping data hidden from attackers. After all, ransomware can’t infect and encrypt what it cannot access. Your backup and recovery solution should be able to create backup stores which are not directly accessible by the operating system. It should also provide configurable backup data immutability to prevent a backup being deleted or modified before the designated retention date.

HPE leads on backup as a service

HPE Backup and Recovery Service delivers the simplicity of the cloud experience while seamlessly protecting on-prem and cloud-native workloads. The solution can meet any backup SLA and is managed from a single console. HPE Backup and Recovery Service sets up in minutes with no additional proxies, virtual appliances, media servers, or software. IT leaders can experience the benefits of HPE Backup and Recovery Service for themselves — including all features and support — with a 90-day free trial.

The bottom line

Data plays an increasingly important role in today’s modern enterprise. As organizations leverage the hybrid cloud to grow and innovate, the volume of data requiring protection continues to expand, and providing that protection becomes more complex and costly. When architecting a data protection strategy and evaluating new technologies, a modern backup as a service solution offers cost efficiency, simplicity, performance, scalability, and future-readiness.

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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.