Is Your Data Protection Ready for the Hybrid Data Center? [On-demand Webcast]

“Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously. But I don’t think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.” — J. J. Abrams

Isn’t it reassuring that a guy with that much Star Wars, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible under his belt has useful insights for system administrators? After all:

“Data location has changed, storage has changed and the cloud options have grown enormously. But I don’t think how you protect data is fundamentally different.” — You

Data protection in your hybrid world

What’s in your IT landscape? Different operating systems and the applications that rely on them. What kind of servers are they running on? Some are on physical machines, others are on virtual machines. Where are those servers? Some are in your data center, others are at remote sites, still others are in the cloud. Which cloud? Some are in your private cloud, others are in the public cloud. Which public cloud? Some are in Amazon Web Services, others are in Microsoft Azure Cloud, still others are in Google Cloud Platform.

Yet even in this evolving, heterogeneous IT landscape, what does your responsibility boil down to? Protecting data. And ensuring you can restore it quickly in the event of an unexpected outage or loss. That’s not fundamentally different from the way it was ten years ago, it it?

That’s why our Michael Gogos, product manager for NetVault® Backup, and Greg Schulz, founder of Server StorageIO, conducted a webcast called Best Practices in Planning On-Prem and Cloud Backup. In it, they walk through the issues involved in protecting a hybrid data center and describe the best ways to address them.

We’ve also published an infographic called Top Considerations for Protecting the Hybrid Data Center. I’ll go over some of its main points.

Top considerations for protecting data in the hybrid data center

Your perspective changes when you have to not only protect all those applications and data but also protect them across a hybrid — on premises and in the cloud — data center.

First, find a single product capable of protecting data in all the physical, virtual, private and public places you store it. That way, no matter where outages strike or files go missing, you can recover your data from a single tool — preferably from anywhere in the world. The alternative is to assemble and maintain an arsenal of backup/restore and disaster recovery products, then document the different procedures for getting files back, based on where they were stored.

Next, deduplicate your data. For many IT teams, deduplicating data has been a nice-to-have, like leaving one’s office at 5:00 p.m. or flossing one’s teeth at night. But as time goes on and urgency increases, they somehow change from nice-to-haves to must-haves. IDC has estimated that the “Global Datasphere” will grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. If your data similarly grows by a factor of more than five, where will you put all that data? By reducing the amount of actual data you send off to storage, deduplication can help ensure your storage budget stays within reason.

Then, replicate to locations off site, embracing a multi-cloud strategy as you do it. At least four out of five of your peers have embarked on a multi-cloud strategy, according to a survey by Virtustream and Forrester. That mitigates risk and helps you achieve disaster-recovery readiness by replicating multiple copies of your backups to different cloud providers.

Next step

Listen to Michael and Greg’s on-demand webcast, Best Practices in Planning On-Prem and Cloud Backup. And have a look at our infographic called Top Considerations for Protecting the Hybrid Data Center. Based on several surveys, it depicts where the hybrid data center is going and how your peers in cloud strategy and application management are getting there.