With so many vulnerabilities around us, data protection remains a top priority for organizations as they face the realization that proactive steps must be taken to ensure data is highly available, accessible and resilient as it continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Along with the acceleration of data growth, one of the major impediments to efficiency and budgets are inefficient data protection systems.

There are ways to modernize the approach to data protection that do not involve breaking the bank.
IBM’s White paper, Ten Ways to Save Money with IBM Data Protection, presents 10 best practices that can help your business protect its valuable data and reap even more than just the financial rewards.

Imagine if your business could use more resources on innovation and less on backup infrastructure?

Here are 10 best practices to help you save money:

Data Deduplication
A good way to control costs is to implement a high-performance and easy-to-use solution for all data protection workloads. Data deduplication can eliminate the duplicate copies by replacing duplicate blocks with pointers to the original source. For example, an email attachment sent to 100 persons can be stored as one source copy with pointers to the other 99. The choices you can consider are deduplication operating on backup servers, source systems, and dedicated deduplication gateways or appliances.

Incremental “forever” Backups
By implementing an approach where you have incremental forever backups will require less time and less infrastructure. You will no longer need to execute full backups for fast-growing virtual environments and file systems and only look at the change / delta since the last backup.

Flexible Deployment Options
By breaking up your payments between infrastructure you own and monthly services, you’ll open up your options to cloud and appliance-based solutions. These can not only reduce the cost but also the complexity of data protection and provide your users with capabilities such as switching systems quickly. The ability to charge per department or per GB provides more flexible charge back options and cost justification.

Simplified Administration
This can be achieved with a solution that will automate and simplify data protection administration and provide central management of different sites. You will ensure data security, reduce reliance on your IT resources and increase efficiency.

Cloud Data Protection
You can benefit from a variety of cloud data protection solutions that can improve staff efficiency and provide flexible billing options.

Massive Scalability
With a comprehensive and well designed scalable backup and recovery solution, it will grow along with your data needs. With proper planning, you can save on costs, increase efficiencies with consolidated backups that will not require additional servers to be purchased.

Open Standards
Your solutions can be optimized through the use of open standards by improving the choices that help you reduce risk, implement dependable solutions, obtain flexibility and benefit from quality products.  This can accelerate innovation, and provide direct value to your company and avoid costly customizations of a proprietary solution.

Single-Vendor Solutions
It may make sense at times to use multiple vendors but there are more advantages to using a single source vendor to save time from integration to deployment to training requiring less time from your IT staff.

Trusted Partner
Hire a trusted partner you can depend on

Zero-Percent Financing
Get projects started sooner and make faster progress to provide faster time-to-value

By leveraging these best practices, your IT organization will be more efficient by spending less time managing inefficient infrastructure and driving more value from it.

Read the White paper for more details.
Ten Ways to Save Money With IBM Data Protection - A Thought Leadership White Paper