Data protection continues to be at the top of list of priorities for businesses going into the new year. In today’s blog, I’ll explore the challenges CIOs are faced with in the data center and how data protection solutions can not only save time and costs but provide competitive advantages to organizations that have executed well on their plan.
Today’s CIO challenges
CIOs main challenges with traditional data centers today are to stay on budget and on schedule with all that is planned.
This also translates into:• Complexity – takes time
• Inefficient – consumes resources
• Restrictive – not adaptable
New era cloud environments and applications such as analytics, mobile and social are driving huge growth in data volumes and this has made data the new natural resource. This has increased complexity and the general evolution of information has become mission-critical data. These increasingly complex data types are turning old data backup and recovery plans obsolete.
Organizations should not hesitate to prioritize the review and update of their corporate data disaster recovery plan. Central backup procedures require a thorough review for proper governance and assurance of data resiliency. This data is now mission critical and must be viewed as legacy business data, just like Finance, HR, etc. This is an additional burden on the IT department to understand the impact of appropriate backup procedures. Organizations need to make sure they are not spending their budgets in ways they’d rather not.
Data Protection Trends
The top trends impacting organizations in this area are:
•
Data Growth: Still the top concern of Data Protection buyers. Double digit growth is driven by cloud Computing, Big data and Analytics, Mobility and Social Media. New workloads add demand to traditional storage for transaction processing, enterprise applications and databases. Storage systems are not keeping up.
•
Cloud: Cloud is becoming a common backup destination. Cloud backup and DR services are thriving
•
Snapshots / Copy Data Management: Continued adoption of snapshots for backup, and hardware-assisted snapshots for VMware
•
Media Matters: Backups to disk are rapidly replacing solutions that backup only to tape. Archiving to tape is increasing in both clouds and on-premises environments
Four ways to mitigate risk and improve data protection
I recommend four ways to reduce the risk of business disruption and improve the value of your data protection infrastructure:
| Trend | Recommended Action |
| Data Growth | Migrate to a data protection infrastructure that can grow faster than
your data |
| Cloud | Take full advantage of the cloud |
| Snapshots | Migrate to frequent snapshots of your critical data |
| Storage Media | Choose the best media type for your backup and archive data |
Data Protection Solutions that can save you money
IBM Spectrum Protect™ is part of the new
IBM Spectrum Storage Family that helps organizations cost-effectively optimize their current storage environments while at the same time exploit new opportunities that have not been possible until now due to strained storage budgets.
IBM data protection solutions, featuring
IBM Spectrum Protect™, enable
advanced data backup and data recovery for virtual, physical, cloud and software defined environments – as well as core applications and remote facilities.
How can IBM Spectrum Protect provide breakthrough data protection?
• It will provide a
53% reduction in backup infrastructure costs to relieve business pressure
• No charge software-defined deduplication delivers without the cost and complexity of other brands
• One Spectrum Protect Server does the work of 5 to 15 servers from other top line brands
• Cloud backup tier reduces storage costs while improving flexibility
• Cloud gateway appliances are not required
• Snapshots are integrated with traditional backups, applications and storage systems
• VMware users and service provider clients benefit of self-service portals for new applications
The IBM Spectrum Storage Family
The new Spectrum Storage family of software allows you to evolve your storage technologies to enterprise-grade, open and scalable hybrid cloud environments. This comprehensive portfolio can manage, control and orchestrate different data types rapidly, flexibly and cost-efficiently across existing and purpose-built cloud infrastructure.
IBM Spectrum Storage unlocks the potential of data and increases your business agility and efficiency in ways that weren’t possible until now. Spectrum Storage enhances the speed and efficiency of your storage and simplifies migration to new workloads by:
Simplifying and integrating storage management and data protection across traditional and new applications
• Delivering elastic scalability with high performance for analytics, big data, social and mobile
• Unifying silos to deliver data without borders with built-in hybrid cloud support
• Optimizing data economics with intelligent data tiering from Flash to tape and cloud
• Building on open architectures supporting industry standards including OpenStack and Hadoop
Find out more about IBM data protection solutions and how they save you money and help you to:
• Reduce or eliminate duplicate data for more efficient protection
• Eliminate the need for full backups for many platforms and applications
• Efficiently scale your environment up or down as your business needs change
• Take advantage of the cloud in your data protection environment
• Rely less on IT by automating more of your data protection
Read the white paper:
Ten ways to save money with IBM Data Protection
To find out more about the IBM Spectrum Storage product family,
visit the interactive infographic.
Imagine the possibilities if your organization’s IT staff could spend more time on innovation and less on managing an inefficient infrastructure.If you would like to discuss your challenges in further detail, feel free to contact me
by email or at the number below.
Happy New Year!
Roger Osmond, President
905.508.8489