Data protection has never been more in the forefront, as information increasingly is the lifeblood and differentiator in a constantly changing world. As the leader we see across the enterprise, which helps solve the larger information management problems that come from accelerating digital business. Keep up with the latest trends and use the following tips to maximize the value of your data protection investment – meeting more demanding SLAs, simplifying management across a complex IT environment, and reducing costs – so you can free up resources to innovate and create business value.
As the largest backup and recovery solution provider in the world, Veritas™ has the unique opportunity to engage with business leaders around the globe, across a wide range of public and private enterprises. And the trend is clear—businesses are under pressure to modernize and go digital, putting IT organizations squarely in the spotlight. In many ways IT is re-inventing themselves to become a business enabler instead of the traditional cost center to provide services and solutions at a speed and efficiency never experienced before. Data protection has never been more in the forefront, as information increasingly is the lifeblood and differentiator in a constantly changing world. As the leader we see across the enterprise, which helps solve the larger information management problems that come from accelerating digital business. Keep up with the latest trends and use the following tips to maximize the value of your data protection investment —meeting more demanding SLAs, simplifying management across a complex IT environment, and reducing costs— so you can free up resources to innovate and create business value.
Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with Converged Data Protection
By 2018 70% of infrastructure spend will be related to digital transformation, according to IDC.1 The same report by IDC also predicts vendor ecosystems will drive 70% of infrastructure purchase decisions with interoperability trumping best of breed by 2017. In light of the many challenges facing enterprise IT today to accelerate digital transformation, look for ways to better leverage and extract more value from your existing infrastructure investments. In this way, you can simplify operations and free up resources needed to focus on strategic initiatives. One of these key investments is your data protection solution. Properly designed, you have the ability to unify and consolidate backup and recovery across physical, virtual, and cloud workloads, regardless of where the data is geographically located, whether on disk, tape, or in the cloud. Many enterprise IT managers find that by fully utilizing the power of a converged data protection platform, they uncover new opportunities to reduce the cost and risk associated with disparate data protection silos. Furthermore, a single proven vendor that has the ability to support today’s needs and is architected for new workloads as they come online will reduce ongoing operational costs immediately while preparing you for tomorrow.
Get Ahead of Exponential Data Growth
Data growth continues unabated and is expected to continue doubling every two years.2 In 2014, IDC predicted that in just six years, worldwide data would increase by 10 fold reaching 44 zettabytes by 2020!3 This is underscored by the many enterprises experiencing data growth into the petabytes driven by massive workloads of tens of thousands of VMs and immense mission critical databases still on physical servers. There are three steps you can take to manage data growth. First, leverage integrated deduplication from the source to an integrated backup appliance. This reduces backup times, network loads, the storage footprint, and optimizes replication for efficient and cost effective disaster recovery. Second, look for a solution that can give you the insights and ability to globally map and visually see where your data hot spots are located. This enables you to better understand and proactively manage your data wherever it resides, potentially reducing storage costs as well as your risk level. And last, don’t let data growth slow performance. Make sure your data protection investment has a proven design for performance at scale with the right tools to meet a broad set of workload needs for today’s requirements and for those anticipated over the next three to five years.
Go Ahead, Embrace the Hybrid Cloud
It’s no secret that the industry is rapidly evolving toward hybrid IT architectures and this journey will include extending the on-premise data center to both public and private clouds. In fact, a recent Veritas IT survey reports 90% of enterprises will move to a hybrid cloud model over the next 12 months.4 Managing and protecting data no matter where it resides is a key success factor when leveraging the cloud. To simplify and accelerate your move to the hybrid cloud, it’s important to ensure your enterprise data protection solution enables you to easily unify and extend the management of workloads and data whether on-premises, in the cloud, at globally dispersed remote locations, on disk or on tape.
Optimize Existing Applications and Free up Resources for New Cloud and Mobile Initiatives
IDC research indicates that by 2020, 60% of all x86 servers will reside outside of the traditional data center as the enterprise moves to “3rd platform” computing driven by cloud, mobility, analytics, and social business.5 However, for the 40% of all physical and virtual workloads remaining in the data center by 2020, they will be tasked with supporting mission critical services such as Oracle databases requiring zero data loss and downtime. Look for a solution that offers accelerated backup and recovery performance along with self-service capabilities. Enabling Oracle database or VM administrators to easily leverage and manage their unique needs with the same converged data protection platform will result in lowered capex and opex costs associated with managing and protecting critical systems. Leverage the power of your existing infrastructure to free up resources while delivering end-to-end visibility for all departments and faster, more predictable backup and recovery performance.
Reduce Cost and Complexity with Integrated Backup Appliances
IDC predicts that the majority of the market will be inclined to purchase storage as a physical appliance for the next five years, and encourages IT teams to shift their focus from maintaining components to delivering policy-based services across dynamic hybrid architectures.6 This is in line with what many IT organizations are finding in that building servers from scratch with components, loading the operating system and installing the applications come with a price. They consume valuable resources, slow deployment cycles, create headaches from managing component compatibility from multiple vendors along with constant performance tuning that ultimately create little if any real business value.
Integrated backup appliances as part of a converged data protection platform are designed to offer fast and seamless integration into your data protection environment with significantly faster time-to-value. They enable simplified management and interoperability, scale easily with predictable performance, and can reduce costs by 30% or more.
Take Pragmatic Steps Towards an “As-a-Service” Organization
Companies are looking to on-demand services and technologies for new ways to increase value. This enables increased agility and resiliency while supporting new business innovations. Adopting an “IT-as-a-service” model for data protection moves the power and speed from what was once solely the domain of the backup admin to internal and external customers and business users alike. Providing IT admins – database, virtual, storage—and even data scientists with policy-based access to flexible and streamlined ‘self-service’ backup and recovery frees up valuable IT resources and improves productivity and agility. Leveraging a single solution that provides this capability while still supporting the larger data protection needs of the business also helps unify physical, virtual, database, storage, and other workload silos that still exist in many enterprises today.
Ease the Pain of Multi-Vendor Virtualization
While virtualization has been widely adopted in the enterprise, the debate continues over the value and benefits of deploying multi-hypervisor environments for flexibility or to solve specific problems. Many analysts see an opportunity for platform based data protection solutions to provide support for multi-hypervisor environments along with physical and hybrid cloud support. Ensure your data protection and management solution supports multiple hypervisors—don’t pick one that doesn’t in 2016. Virtualization management and cloud management are converging; therefore, your future virtualization management and data protection solution must support multiple on-premises and cloud virtual machines.
Integrate and Simplify Global Snapshot Management
Snapshots and replication are fast becoming key components in an overall data protection strategy for managing increasingly tighter backup and recovery service level agreements (SLAs). However, while initially seen as a highly effective backup and recovery tool, a snapshot on its own becomes another disparate silo in the IT landscape. A more effective method of managing snapshots is to leverage the proven, global lifecycle management and orchestration capabilities of an enterprise class data protection solution. Look for straight forward integration that enables snapshot management to be easily automated, initiated, and replicated both on and off-premises, whether to disk, tape, or the cloud. Ensure you have policy-based retention and the ability to perform granular recovery down to the file level from any snapshot image replicated and located anywhere.
Source: http://resources.idgenterprise.com/original/AST-0162250_GA_ENT_DS-8-Tips-to-Stay-Ahead-Top-2016-Data-Protection-Trends-APPROVED_1.20.16.pdf
