November 18, 2020

Future-Proof Your Backup Strategy

Creating a comprehensive backup strategy is not something to be done once and then forgotten about.

With data spread across an ever growing number of IT environments, the best backup strategies should be comprehensive, straightforward, fast, efficient and evolving to meet new challenges.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, “50% of organisations will augment or replace their current backup application with another solution”, confirming that enterprises are now demanding more from their backup.

Backup and recovery should be simple and automated and meet business SLAs. It should have the ability to evolve and adapt as circumstances change and new threats emerge. And it should add value to your business. Here are some of the main factors you should take into consideration when formulating your approach:

USE YOUR DATA

Email, company files, financial data, Personally Identifiable Information. The type of data to be protected might require a different approach. PII for instance falls under the General Data Protection Regulation and requires a strategy of its own to be fully compliant or risk damaging fines. Backup data can help your business be compliant with the GDPR and HIPAA.

Simplifying the backup of data and applications through a managed backup service allows you to address use cases that a single vendor cannot always offer.

MITIGATE THREATS

Cyber threats are ever present so no compromise should be made on security. Ransomware attacks have increased in recent years and in addition to encrypting drives, often target backups. Typically the attacker will attempt to raise their privileges to the point where they have access to the backups and will delete them before encrypting the drives. It is therefore essential to have an air-gapped, untamperable copy that cannot be accessed by local credentials. Ideally the air-gapped copy would also have security software that could identify compromised backups, allowing good copies of the data to be restored and the systems restarted.

MANAGE COSTS

Continually taking and moving copies of data is costly and takes time away from any busy IT team. Eliminate unnecessary copies with a backup solution that is incremental, copying only the changes, and uses deduplication to eliminate redundant data copies and reduce storage overheads. Purchasing the solution as part of a Managed Service also allows you to flex the capacity to meet your needs and if, for example, new systems or platforms have to be covered, they can be accommodated without the need for additional CAPEX spend.

UNIFIED SOLUTION

It is possible to have a unified backup solution to protect data across on-premise, public cloud and hybrid environments. A Backup as a Service solution allows multiple systems and locations to backup as part of a single solution covering infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) workloads, providing oversight for governance and compliance.

SPEED RECOVERY

Time is of the essence if you need to get to your backups. If the backup cannot be restored quickly there is little point having it. Are your backups easy to get to? Are some backups more important than others? By having near real-time, hourly or daily backups you minimize the chance of data loss.

GAIN INSIGHT

Rather than having backup data just sitting around waiting to be needed, how about you put it to work? With some backup solutions you have to move the backups to a different environment to gain any insight from the data they contain. The solutions USNL offer are cloud-based, enabling the centralization of dispersed silos of data to ensure compliance, security and to allow you to run third-party applications directly onto the backed up data for analytics and e-discovery. The more data you have, the more valuable the insight for test and dev teams, for compliance and for spotting vulnerabilities.

Modernize your approach to backup and recovery with efficient managed data protection that looks to the future and enjoy peace of mind across the whole of your IT estate.