4 Ways to Get More Mileage Out of Your Backup Data

Data is your enterprise’s most valuable digital resource. Yet legacy backup point products fragment your data across infrastructure silos, management systems, and locations, making it too complex for IT to find, protect, and leverage for business differentiation. What’s needed is a simpler way to make use of all your data. Hyperconverged, software-defined backup infrastructure eliminates unnecessary data copies and addresses mass data fragmentation by consolidating all backed up data and apps on a single web-scale platform. The best of these solutions work from core to cloud and edge so you have unified, global access to all of your backup data with simple Google-like search.

As your organization embraces an agile DevOps model, you want to optimize the productivity of all of your solution builders. Unfortunately, the data developers need to speed application creation and testing is often too hard to access, slowing your developers down. In an agile world, this may seem unacceptable but it’s a reality for IT teams using legacy backup with inefficient processes that involve creating multiple data copies that are costly and pose compliance issues. A modern backup solution should accelerate test/dev delivery both on-premises and across clouds by making backup data easily and instantly available. It should support the quick zero-cost cloning, customizing, and tearing down of test/dev environments on a single platform, further eliminating fragmented, expensive-to-operate infrastructure stacks dedicated to development. Above all, data should never be an impediment to the pace of innovation.

Ransomware attacks have grown by more than 700% over the past few years²2, and are expected to cost organizations $11 billion this year.²3 Disconnected, legacy backup products are adding to your enterprise’s cyber challenges as attackers increasingly modify their ransomware to track down and eliminate backups — often as the first point of attack. What’s needed is an efficient solution that both protects backup infrastructure from becoming a target and quickly responds if an attack does happen. A modern, web-scale backup solution should not only incorporate machine learning to continuously monitor for anomalies in your data, it should quickly and automatically locate and remediate infected data across your global footprint, inclusive of public clouds when the worst case happens. Of course, it must also be able to perform instant mass restore to any point in time to bring back your data and apps fast for business continuity.

Backups contain valuable business information. Yet legacy products result in data silos that prevent you from finding and using all of your data for actionable business insights. Shining a light on dark data to support organizations’ e-discovery, compliance, and analytics requirements makes good business sense. Therefore, a unified backup solution needs to let you easily analyze massive data sets to derive insights and avoid compliance violations. You should be able to run applications — from those that analyze patterns to those that detect vulnerable passwords — atop a platform that helps you get more out of your data. Ideally, any modern solution provides even more capabilities: an application software-development kit (SDK) that allows you to build your own apps to run against your backup data plus a marketplace for you to share your apps and discover those contributed by others, as well.