The True Cost of Aging Infrastructure: Don’t Wait to Deploy Modern Data Protection

With the recent rise in cyberattacks and exponential data growth, protecting data has become job #1 for many IT organizations. Their biggest hurdle: managing aging infrastructure with limited resources. But tight budgets should not discourage business leaders from modernizing data protection – in fact, it’s the other way around. Most legacy infrastructures deliver very little value for the cost, and they can leave your data vulnerable.

Organizations that leverage older backup technology don’t have the tools they need to face modern threats. Rigid, siloed infrastructures aren’t agile or scalable enough to keep up with fluctuations in data requirements, and they are based on an equally rigid backup approach. Traditional backup systems behave like insurance policies, locking data away until you need it. That’s like having an extra car battery in the garage, waiting for a possible crisis. The backup battery might seem like a reasonable preventive measure, but most of the time it’s a waste of space, and if the crisis never arises it’s an unnecessary upfront investment, more expensive than useful.

In today’s environment where cash is king and onsite resources are particularly limited, some IT departments are postponing data protection modernization, looking to simplify overall operations and lower infrastructure costs first. But that plan can block a company’s progress. While it’s clear that traditional backup approaches are no longer enough, it’s just as clear that businesses can’t afford a strategy that doesn’t keep costs in line, help accelerate processes, and improve business outcomes.

It’s time for a more versatile, modern data protection solution.

Modern data protection puts you in control of data – and costs

By taking a more modern approach, you don’t have to choose between cost-effective operations and agile, scalable data protection. A strategy that thoughtfully augments your legacy infrastructure with new, more nimble technology can help reduce complexity, cost, and risk, while accelerating your organization’s time to value.

Modern data protection solutions have five key characteristics that help clients quickly back up, recover, and maximize the value of their backup data.

1. Simplified operations: Modern solutions are very simple to use and deploy, with automated policies, intuitive UIs, virtual deployments, and agentless options. Self-service solutions support multiple functions, reducing the burden on IT staff and the need for additional point solutions.

2. Cloud agility: Cloud storage offers flexible capacity and supreme agility without additional capital investment. Cloud services scale up or down to meet unpredictable demands, and because data is stored and managed offsite, your IT staff is freed up from operational tasks.

3. Cost reduction: Costs have decreased significantly in recent years, primarily because solutions are more efficient and flexible. Combining elastic scaling and pay-as-you-consume models, new “as-a-service” solutions align spend with business demands, helping to eliminate the financial burden and complexity of planning data protection infrastructure.

4. Meeting demanding SLAs: Data Protection SLAs are all about recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Newer technologies deliver faster, simpler, and more flexible recovery both on-premises and in the cloud to meet even the most demanding SLAs.

5. Maximized data value: Your backups can be more than an expensive insurance policy. Differentiated solutions offer the ability to quickly, simply, and securely access and reuse data in the backup repository for multiple business use cases, enabling lines of business and project teams to gain insights from that data.

Technology limitations should not dictate the way you protect data

Be wary of solutions that offer a “rip-and-replace” approach to data protection. These clean sweep deployment methods typically mean the vendor doesn’t support your current solution, which makes your transition challenging. An effective modernization solution should support both the current data protection workflows and processes and provide differentiated capabilities to change business outcomes, incenting a transition to any new platform.

HPE cloud services for data protection through HPE GreenLake enable protection and recovery of data on-premises, at the edge, or in the public cloud. HPE GreenLake consumption-based services improve efficiencies by simplifying operations, aligning infrastructure with actual use, and turning your backup data into an asset. Data protection as-a-service is designed to meet demanding SLAs across a spectrum of RPOs and RTOs where compliance and retention are key. These services make backing up and recovering data effortless and automated, through a simple point-and-click experience and powerful APIs.

You can deploy HPE cloud services very quickly, from rapid recovery to long term retention, either locally (on-premises) or in the cloud, depending on your business requirements.

On-premises backup as a service

Workloads and applications that require extremely low RTOs and RPOs can deploy an on-premises backup appliance (such as HPE StoreOnce) delivered as a cloud service. On-demand protection eliminates upfront capital expenses, and predictable consumption-based billing aligns your cost to business value. HPE StoreOnce appliances integrate with leading backup solutions, enabling IT staff to use existing backup workflows and processes.

Cloud data protection

HPE Cloud Volumes Backup lets you move your backup infrastructure to the cloud directly from any storage array and any backup software – without egress charges or cloud lock-in. Administrators can spin up storage capacity in the cloud in minutes and integrate existing data workflows without having to initialize, configure, manage, or tune any physical or virtual infrastructure.

HPE Cloud Volumes Backup unifies backup data in the cloud, removing mass fragmentation with open support for any primary storage array and any data protection software like Veeam, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, MicroFocus, and others. Because it is readily accessible, your backup data is transformed into a business asset. Administrators can restore workloads on-premises or easily leverage public cloud for multiple use cases, such as test/dev, reporting, and analytics, enabling them to derive insights from the data.

Data protection as a service – edge to cloud

Modernizing data protection is key to keeping pace with today’s changing hybrid cloud environments and ensuring data and applications achieve always-on availability. While your organization will have its own set of requirements, in general you should focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, and future-readiness when architecting your data protection strategy. New technologies can improve efficiencies by reducing cost, risk, and complexity in backup environments. Protecting your data on-premises and in a distributed-cloud environment will set you up to deliver on future SLAs, enabling you to meet demanding RPOs and RTOs, and keep your business moving ahead.

Modernize your data protection in minutes with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup

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About Ashish Prakash

^{Ashish Prakash is the Vice President & GM of the Cloud Data Services team in the HPE Storage & Big Data group. In this role, Ashish is responsible for defining and developing simple and consistent customer cloud experiences that can deliver private, machine learning, data protection, and connectivity as-a-service. Prior to his current role, Ashish led Product Management responsible for HPE Nimble Storage, HPE Cloud Volumes, and HPE Infosight.}