Cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. That’s up from $3 trillion in 2015—a 100% increase over just six years. Cybercriminals are siphoning precious dollars from companies in lost productivity, remediation, ransoms, and thefts. But there is hope.
While there are plenty of technologies to help you better protect your data, software should be one of the most critically examined pieces of that puzzle. An effective data protection solution should simplify data security, make backups and recovery a snap—even at scale—and ensure total business continuity. Here are the features you should keep in mind when evaluating your data protection options:
1. Simple Deployment and Management
Look for a data protection solution that includes unified service-level-agreement-driven (SLA) management for the complete data protection workflow. That means the solution you choose should provide management and analytics for all the data you’re protecting. It should also seamlessly integrate into your existing infrastructure—including VMware vCenter and Hyper-V environments—so it’s as easy to deploy as it is to set up a virtual appliance.
You’ll also value the ease of management from a single dashboard that gives you an overview of the health of your system, especially if that dashboard enables the creation of intuitive SLA-based policies. You can apply a given policy to any combination of virtual and physical machines that share similar requirements. Policy-based administration makes it easy to manage backup frequency, retention policy, target location, and replication for offsite disaster recovery at scale.
2. Flexibility, Scalability, and Completeness
Data protection and recovery solutions that are designed to scale make the most sense for handling the increasing mountains of data your organization generates. Software-based solutions that are built on a microservices-based architecture allow for massive scalability—so you can quickly scale service nodes for an unlimited number of sites.
3. Fast and Easy Recovery
When disaster strikes, there is no time to waste. Data protection software components like VirtualBoot technology from StorageCraft let you instantly boot backup images as virtual machines (VMs), restoring your data and enabling full access to system resources and applications in seconds, without any impact on performance.
4. Bulletproof and Complete Business Continuity
Finally, business continuity is the most important reason you need to protect data. How will you make sure your business can get up and running as soon as possible if a data failure occurs? To ensure total business continuity, a data protection solution should include orchestrated, virtual failover. So, if a storage node—or even your entire network—fails, you can instantly recover. Data protection software that includes tight integration with disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions ensures that all backups are replicated to a secure cloud location. DRaaS solutions can even enable you to set up one-click failover in the cloud, easily recovering your entire infrastructure and ensuring business continuity.
Originally published on the StorageCraft Recovery Zone blog, March 19, 2020
