Today’s challenging technology landscape utilizes many different kinds of solutions for critical applications. Organizations today look much different from a technology perspective than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The technology landscape is vastly different than only a few years ago. Today’s businesses are under tighter uptime SLAs and data access requirements than ever before. Making sure that customers and business-critical process always have access to the data needed is of utmost importance.
However, it can be challenging for organizations to meet all their data protection demands with a single solution, or is it?
Let’s take a look at capabilities that 2019 Data Protection Solutions must include and why these are important in today and tomorrow’s diverse data landscapes. By examining backup trends in 2019, it becomes helpful to scrutinize data protection solutions to ensure they deliver on the demands the business will no doubt face in this upcoming year.
Data Protection Trends in 2019
Like the weather, we can by no means with absolute certainty know what the future holds for 2019, however, we can examine current trends and demands on IT in the realm of data protection and extrapolate future requirements. There are going to be several areas of concern for data protection in 2019 and beyond.
Let’s look at the following:
- Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
- Compliance
- Software-defined storage
- Software-as-a-Service protection
- Continuous data protection
Let’s look at each of these trends and see why they will be important in the coming year and beyond for organizations choosing and architecting data protection solutions.
Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
You would had to have had your head in the sand for the past 5-10 years to not have heard something about cloud or public cloud. Cloud technology is literally everywhere. It is part of any tech talk you hear today, the material you read, and service you consider as a solution for solving business problems. Moving services and infrastructure to the cloud is a migration path that most organizations if they haven’t already begun, will no doubt take part in the next year or more. Cloud just makes sense for many areas of IT. Building out on-premises service offering to compete with what public cloud providers are offering is just simply not possible or feasible for most enterprises. With that being said, it makes a lot of sense to leverage public cloud for certain aspects of IT infrastructure or services.
Organizations are looking today to provision core pieces of infrastructure in environments such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure public clouds. These provide powerful offerings for provisioning servers, Functions-as-a-Service, or “serverless” architectures with robust API support and cutting-edge development environments and tools.
Data protection solutions need to have the ability to interact with not just one of the major public clouds, but many if not all of them to stay relevant to the needs of today’s businesses. Organizations today want to avoid “vendor lock-in” if possible, by keeping their options open. By having a robust data protection solution that is equally adept at interacting with more than one public cloud environment, businesses are able to keep their options open if business needs and strategies change or align more closely with one public cloud or numerous public clouds in the future.
Compliance Regulations
Compliance is going to continue to become a more hot-button item in various countries. Many have speculated that the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR that was only this year enforced in the EU is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to forthcoming compliance regulations on data and data governance. Businesses need to make sure the tools and solutions used in their organization that interacts with the data itself, has the ability to properly align with these new compliance regulations. Data protection solutions certainly interact with production data. In 2019 and beyond, data protection solutions need to have the features and functionality required to properly abide by the restrictions or information discovery requirements that compliance regulations demand.
Software-Defined Storage
Software-defined storage solutions are going to continue to lead the trends in production, enterprise storage. There are many advantages that come with making use of software-defined storage. So much so, that many organizations are looking at completely replacing traditional storage devices with software-defined solutions in the next refresh cycle. A great example of an enterprise-ready software-defined storage solution is VMware’s vSAN technology. VMware vSAN has seen wild success in the enterprise datacenter and the momentum is only going to continue. Many organizations are enticed by enterprise features such as the ability to configure, provision, and control storage right from the hypervisor, use storage-based policy management to tier storage and implement security features on a per-VMDK basis, and the ability to effectively use commodity storage media makes it powerful.
The data protection solutions of both today and tomorrow need to have the ability to properly interact with and protect software-defined storage solutions as these become increasingly popular and new technologies continue to develop such as vSAN and also Storage Spaces Direct.
Software-as-a-Service or SaaS
A very popular first step involved in migrating resources to the cloud often starts with such critical business services as email and file storage. With today’s great cloud email service offerings by the likes of Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, as well as storage services like Google’s Cloud Storage and Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business, businesses have very affordable and powerful offerings to host these services in the cloud, instead of on-premises. Additionally, by leveraging the world-class infrastructure that these services are built on, organizations can allow employees to have access from anywhere, any device, and coming from any network without special VPN connections or other network complexity.
Software-as-a-Service email and cloud storage offerings will no doubt be a consideration for enterprises looking to upgrade their email or storage offerings in 2019 and beyond. Housing these types of services in the cloud can make a lot of sense for businesses today who may not have the staff or expertise to create these robust communication and storage infrastructures on-premises. Offloading these types of infrastructure to public cloud SaaS environments can allow businesses today to concentrate more of their time on their business objectives and business-related applications.
Even though these applications are housed in the cloud, they still need to be protected. Organizations need to have a fully featured solution that allows backing up these critical services in the public cloud. Such SaaS services as email, file storage, contacts, SharePoint, etc, all need to be protected if they are hosted in these SaaS offerings from the big public cloud vendors.
Continuous Data Protection
Businesses today are being required to have tighter and tighter SLAs on data availability. This means that the Restore Point Objective and Restore Time Objective, RPO and RTO respectively, are being lowered by both business and customer demands. With that being said, more is being demanded from today’s data protection solutions. These must be able to provide closer to continuous data protection as possible so that as little data as possible is lost and getting the data back online as quickly as possible is easily achievable. In 2019 these SLAs, including RPO and RTO, must be able to be met and exceeded by data protection providers.
Vembu BDR Suite Single Solution for Challenging Problems
Having the ability to solve many complex and challenging problems with a single solution is certainly a tall order in today’s complex world of ever-increasing demands on data protection and data availability.
With Vembu BDR Suite v4.0, businesses have an all-encompassing, single solution that allows them to protect a wide variety of production workloads. This includes not only traditional, on-premises virtual environments, including VMware and Hyper-V with Hyper-V clusters, but also public cloud workloads, hybrid environments, and also Software-as-a-Service solutions such as Office 365 and Google G Suite.
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