Johannesburg, 01 Apr 2019
World Backup Day on Sunday 31 March brought into sharp focus the importance of regularly backing up data, but there is more to this aspect of data management that businesses can ill-afford to neglect.
This is according to global data management SaaS specialist Redstor, which asserts that best practice in dealing with the challenges of legacy backup technology and manual backup processes is to develop a policy-driven and fully automated methodology.
"Monitoring and managing a manual backup process can be a tedious and time-consuming task and easily be forgotten. In addition, legacy backup technologies typically cannot scale to support the explosion in new apps and growing data sets experienced by most businesses today. Best practice involves having a robust, policy-driven and fully automated data backup methodology that liberates your IT team," says Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at Redstor.
Liberation in today's market is linked to cloud solution application, says Redstor, because "having a purpose-built, cloud-first solution allows you to scale up or down as demand changes, because installation should be easy and there is a lack of hardware, media or transit costs."
The most cost-effective way to go is to choose a provider with a simple and predictable subscription-based pricing model where you only pay for what you use with a transparent cost per GB.
Speed of recovery is what matters
However, when organisations consider the best way to protect their most valuable asset, it would be a huge oversight to focus purely on backup.
"What organisations are really paying for is recovery, or, more specifically, speed of recovery," says Marais. "How quickly you respond to and recover from a disaster will ultimately define your business, and no one can afford to risk catastrophic fines, reputational damage or loss of business."
Organisations can now radically reduce the impact of security incidents, data breaches and hardware failures.
With InstantData, Redstor's unique, user-driven streaming technology, there's no longer a need to wait for a full recovery before accessing data. You can be up and running within seconds, not days.
"While the rest of your data is restored behind the scenes, users can start accessing the files that they need immediately," Marais continues.
Convergence of backup, recovery, archiving and DR
According to Redstor, treating backup and recovery in isolation from other data management challenges also risks missing out on the bigger picture.
The company explains that businesses are now looking for ways to unify backup and recovery, archiving, and disaster recovery through a centralised solution, demanding simplified deployment and billing to radically reduce costs and still fully comply with ever more stringent regulations.
As unstructured data grows exponentially, so do the associated storage and management costs. "The time has come to ditch legacy technologies such as magnetic tape and expensive, clunky archiving solutions and swap them for simple, scalable, and instantly accessible cloud archiving," Marais adds.
Borderless visibility of data
Organisations can identify and mitigate data risks and reduce storage costs by easily moving data to the cloud, without any impact on data accessibility.
This is another reason why cloud solution adoption and implementation is widely considered to be a tactical move.
"By offloading redundant, obsolete or trivial data to the cloud, you can free up capacity and delay the purchase of more primary storage to cope with data growth," Marais says.
Redstor's InstantData ensures all archived data can be streamed instantly on demand.
This means compliance with legislation and regulation, including the requirement to securely erase files from within backup and archive environments, is made simple and auditable.
Today's world is on demand, the technology is now available for organisations to discover, manage and control their data from a single control centre, wherever it is stored.
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