Your company is counting on IT to help it realize value from all your data. Yet continually creating and moving data copies to make the most of it — on-premises, across hybrid clouds, and to the edge — is time-consuming and costly. What if instead of your backups only storing data as an insurance policy to prepare for a worst-case disaster scenario, you could use the backup data every day to:
- Simplify backups
- Speed development
- Defend against cyber threats
- Reveal new business insights
Here are four ways a modern backup solution delivers competitive advantage:
1. Consolidate backup infrastructure to eliminate data fragmentation
Data is your enterprise’s most valuable digital resource. Yet legacy backup point products fragment your data across infrastructure silos, management systems, and locations, making it too complex for IT to find, protect, and leverage for business differentiation. What’s needed is a simpler way to make use of all your data.
According to Network World, mass data fragmentation is holding companies back. Hyperconverged, software-defined backup infrastructure eliminates unnecessary data copies and addresses mass data fragmentation by consolidating all backed up data and apps on a single web-scale platform. The best of these solutions work from core to cloud and edge so you have unified, global access to all of your backup data with simple Google-like search.
2. Accelerate DevTest with backup data
As your organization embraces an agile DevOps model, you want to optimize the productivity of all of your solution builders. Unfortunately, the data developers need to speed application creation and testing is often too hard to access, slowing your developers down. In an agile world, this may seem unacceptable but it’s a reality for IT teams using legacy backup with inefficient processes that involve creating multiple data copies that are costly and pose compliance issues.
A modern backup solution should accelerate DevTest delivery both on-premises and across clouds by making backup data easily and instantly available. It should support the quick zero-cost cloning, customizing, and tearing down of DevTest environments on a single platform, further eliminating fragmented, expensive-to-operate infrastructure stacks dedicated to development. Above all, data should never be an impediment to the pace of innovation.
3. Use backup data to mitigate ransomware attacks
Ransomware attacks have grown by more than 700% over the past few years, and are expected to cost organizations $11 billion this year. Disconnected, legacy backup products are adding to your enterprise’s cyber challenges as attackers increasingly modify their ransomware to track down and eliminate backups — often as the first point of attack. What’s needed is an efficient solution that both protects backup infrastructure from becoming a target and quickly responds if an attack does happen.
A modern, web-scale backup solution should not only incorporate machine learning to continuously monitor for anomalies in your data. It should quickly and automatically locate and remediate infected data across your global footprint, inclusive of public clouds when the worst case happens. Of course, it must also be able to perform instant mass restore to any point in time to bring back your data and apps fast for business continuity.
4. Derive insights out of dark backup data
Your backup data contains valuable business information, but data silos created by legacy backup products make what’s most important challenging to find and turn into actionable insights. Shining a light on dark data to support organizations’ e-discovery, compliance, and analytics requirements makes good business sense. Therefore, a unified backup solution needs to let you easily analyze massive data sets to derive insights and avoid compliance violations.
You should be able to run applications — from those that analyze patterns to those that detect vulnerable passwords — atop a platform that helps you get more out of your data. Therefore, a unified backup solution needs to let you easily analyze massive data sets to derive insights and avoid compliance violations.
Simply and Quickly Find Value in Your Backup Data
The data in your backups can be game-changing for your business. Don’t overlook it and just consider it an insurance policy. Replace expensive, legacy backup silos with a hyperconverged backup solution that lets you demand — and actually get more — from your backup data. Eliminate unnecessary data copies and bring compute and apps to the data to accelerate positive business outcomes. Derive insights that give your business a competitive boost.
Learn how to modernize your backup and recovery.
