Backup solutions

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What Are Backup Solutions?

Backup solutions are technologies that duplicate and store copies of enterprise production data to be used in case of a data loss event. The main role of backup solutions is to enable access to important data when there’s unexpected IT or business disruption such as a natural disaster (e.g., fire, flood, hurricane), system failure, ransomware attack, or insider threat.

Once considered an expensive insurance policy, modern backup and recovery plans and the solutions powering them have become business-critical because they not only prevent expensive downtime, they enable developers to unleash innovation. Where legacy backup solutions led to time-consuming and costly operations, modern backup solutions are simplifying data management and backup at scale.

Why Are Backup Solutions Important?

Structured and unstructured data is growing at unprecedented levels, both on-premises and in the cloud. At the same time, it’s becoming more valuable to organizations every day. Data-driven enterprises, on average, generate more than 30 percent growth per year, according to Accenture. Yet harnessing valuable data for business insights is still difficult for many teams. That’s where modern backup solutions excel.

Backup solutions that are automated and easy to use ensure business continuity and minimize data loss. They reduce downtime and help defend data against threats and disasters while streamlining compliance with industry and government long-term data retention requirements.

With a modern backup solution, organizations gain enterprise-class performance and security to:

  • Meet demanding business service-level agreements (SLAs) — Teams can dramatically reduce Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives (RTOs/RPOs) without any performance impact to production systems.
  • Defend backup data against ransomware — Organizations can proactively monitor and detect threats to stop intrusions, and should the worst-case scenario happen, organizations can also quickly search and recover a single file or hundreds, even thousands, of virtual machines (VMs), files and objects, and databases instantly.
  • Speed innovation — Complete with DevOps automation, backup solutions help speed the provisioning of real-world data to development and testing teams for maximum agility.

What Do Backup Solutions Do?

Data growth is accelerating. The deluge is coming from human-generated data as well as a myriad of sensors and machines distributed across locations and siloed systems. Backup solutions capture and keep all of the data enterprises generate so that in case of a data loss event, the production data is still available, and the business can continue to operate.

What Are Backup Storage Solutions?

A backup storage solution is a legacy, siloed system used to keep enterprise data that is not running in production or needed right away. With data becoming more important to business success, many organizations are replacing backup solutions that pre-date the cloud with modern backups within a next-gen data management solution.

A next-gen data management solution—running on-premises or in a cloud environment (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform)—with modern backup is critical to business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategies. A single backup solution for cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments empowers organizations to strengthen their data management security and harness business insights for a competitive advantage.

How Backup Solutions Work

Modern, software-defined backups—either self-managed or as a Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering—bring simplicity to IT environments. They eliminate the compute, storage, and software silos that are typically managed separately and create mass data fragmentation.

Modern backup converges operations, including the protection of bare-metal servers as well as many different data sources from databases to virtual machines (VMs) to containers. Comprehensive, modern backup solutions will cover popular enterprise workloads, including serving as backup solutions for VMware. By consolidating all copies of data into one platform, enterprises significantly reduce overall capacity requirements while leveraging data for a competitive edge.

BaaS also enhances the built-in retention policies of Microsoft 365, serving as a third-party backup solution, which Microsoft recommends.

With modern backup, IT staff get a single management interface and dashboard for complete visibility into all of their data—regardless of where it resides—across environments and deployment models (self-managed or BaaS).

Are Backup Solutions Worth It?

Ransomware attacks are on the rise, with payouts expected to reach $1.75 trillion by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Whether an organization experiences a malicious action by cyber criminals, an insider threat, or a natural disaster, backup solutions help minimize data loss, lowering costs and the time it takes to resume business operations.

If you are unsure whether backup solutions are worth it, consider the cost of downtime, which can often be in the millions, and the time and resources taken away from innovation. Sky Lakes Medical Center IT professionals recently praised its backup solution, explaining:

“Our organization suffered a critical ransomware attack, effectively crippling our entire infrastructure. With Cohesity, we’ve been able to recover machines and file shares, verify they’re clean, and bring the applications back online. Cohesity has literally saved us hundreds of hours of work and I’d say it prevented us from having to actually pay the ransom note. We all still have jobs and the community has a functional hospital because we have had so much success with Cohesity.” — Sam Stewart, Sky Lakes Network Systems Analyst.

“In this case, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Cohesity saved lives.” — Nick Fossen, Manager of Technology Solutions at Sky Lakes.

Are Backup Solutions Safe?

Yes. Robust data management security is built into modern backup solutions. Although cyber attackers target production and backup data, a modern backup solution instantiating a Threat Defense Architecture keeps bad actors out by using encryption, immutability, failover, and failback capabilities. Collectively, these security capabilities, coupled with proactive artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-powered insights and data governance, help defend against intruders and downtime in environments spanning multicloud, at edge locations and on-premises.

Should ransomware compromise production systems, modern backup solutions also help businesses get back up and running fast by restoring thousands of VMs, databases, and more in minutes and hours rather than days or weeks.

What Is the Best Backup Strategy to Use?

In the age of ransomware, backup solutions are the infrastructure for defense against cyber criminals. When evaluating backup programs, enterprises should be thinking about their strategic goals; for example, how do we improve cyber resilience in our hybrid or multicloud environment?

The answer to that question is a next-gen approach to data management. It provides simplicity at scale, data protection built on the principles of Zero Trust security, and AI/ML-powered insights to make it easy for companies to derive value from all of their data.

What Is the Ideal Backup Solution?

The ideal backup solution and best practice is part of a comprehensive next-gen data management solution, which features key capabilities such as the ability to:

  • Protect most enterprise data sources—from mainframes to modern Software as a Service (SaaS)-based applications
  • Protect the backup data and system against modern cybersecurity threats
  • Meet demanding recovery service-level agreements (SLAs)
  • Ease management tasks, reducing IT staff burdens
  • Help reduce data sprawl, attack vectors, and costs

What Storage and Backup Solutions Are the Most Popular?

Most of the storage and backup solutions in today’s enterprises were built before the cloud era. They were typically architected as a patchwork of one-function solutions assembled over time to house more data, so they each have their own processes and management interfaces. Many require management specialists to operate them, which keeps them siloed and the data hidden from other systems. That makes it challenging for protecting data and delivering business insights, which keeps IT and business leaders up at night.

Because of these limitations, today’s data management with modern backup is outpacing the most popular storage and backup solutions for ingesting, storing, and organizing the data enterprises create and collect.

Can Backup Solutions Help Small Businesses?

Backup is essential for every digital business. Companies of all sizes and across industries need a fast, continuous, reliable backup solution to boost cyber resiliency and prevent or minimize data loss. Moreover, small businesses aren’t immune to ever-changing data-retention requirements, and robust backup can make it easier to stay in compliance.

Cohesity and Backup Solutions

As part of an integrated next-gen data management platform, Cohesity delivers a high-performance, software-defined backup solution for the cloud era. Enterprises of all sizes are meeting their data management, data protection, and data security goals with Cohesity. Backup solutions from Cohesity empower organizations to achieve demanding SLAs, defend data against ransomware, and speed innovation with data-driven insights.

Cohesity is a modern data management and security solution with comprehensive policy-based protection for both traditional and modern data sources. In operation, it converges multiple-point products into a single software platform that can be deployed as on-premises or consumed as a service (BaaS).

Enterprises choosing Cohesity’s modern  solution for backup enjoy:

  • Hyperscale simplicity with broad application support — Organizations replace costly and resource-intensive legacy backup silos with a single, easy to use solution providing consistent and comprehensive protection for many data sources: virtual and physical servers; traditional and containerized apps; enterprise, modern, and cloud-native databases; NAS and SaaS.
  • Lightning-fast recovery — Near-zero and near-instant RPOs/RTOs to meet business-level SLAs enable teams to reduce downtime with instant mass restore, and can cut existing data protection costs by 70% or more.
  • Freedom of choice — Enterprises can deploy Cohesity DataProtect as self-managed, as a service (BaaS), or work with a managed service provider to achieve business capacity and economics goals, mixing-and-matching as well as changing configurations without penalty.

 

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