The term ‘backup’ is synonymous with data protection in the digital age. As in the conventional understanding of the term, backups allow for the continuation of operation, whether it is a backup generator, backup sewage pump, or backup IT infrastructure. Data can be lost through various means; fire, power outages, cyberattacks, hard drives failures, human errors, and natural disasters are just some of the plausible causes. No matter how you lose the data, it will be costly. It was estimated that each hour of downtime would cost a small company US$8,000, US$74,000 for a medium-sized company, and US$700,000 for a large enterprise (reference: Datto.com). Therefore, the ability to rapidly access infrastructure and recover data in the event of a disaster with minimal business interruption should be the top priority for any business.
What is an effective backup solution? On its services and consulting webpage, IBM highlighted key steps all comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plans should address, of which two are:
- backup operations procedures to ensure that essential data processing operational tasks can be conducted after the disruption; and
- recovery actions procedures to facilitate the rapid restoration of a data processing system following a disaster.
Traditionally, businesses would make a copy of the data stored in a hard drive onto a separate hard drive at a predetermined frequency and store the backup hard drive either on-site or off-site. In the case of an event that disrupted the IT system and that the original hard drive was compromised or the data on it was no longer accessible, data would be recovered using the newest copy on the backup hard drive. However, as more data is being generated and more applications are being created, coupled with operations with virtual machines in cloud platforms, the conventional backup and recovery approach becomes obsolete. In today’s digital realm, a backup and recovery solution must be able to backup and recover the entire IT infrastructure efficiently, rapidly, and successfully in both traditional on-premises, hybrid, and cloud hosting models.
Of all the backup, recovery, and data management solutions in the market, we at Ferroque Systems are particularly drawn to solutions from Veeam® for its comprehensiveness in data protection who has over a decade of experience as a trusted leader in the space. We are proud to partner with Veeam® in our solutions offerings. Here we will touch on, among many to choose from, three features of Veeam® which we feel are crucial for our customers.
First, Veeam® is an image-based, storage-agnostic backup solution. The company designed its solutions around the premises of storage, not the environment. Customers have different IT infrastructures and evolving needs. For example, customer A wants to store the backup of its on-premise IT system and data on physical mediums, but customer B needs to store backups virtually; customer C must store the backup of its cloud-based IT system on cloud storage but customer D is switching to a different cloud, and customer E frequently changes its IT infrastructure. No matter the circumstances, Veeam® backs up seamlessly. Analogously speaking, if an IT infrastructure was a painting and the canvas was its environment, then Veeam® could replicate the painting regardless of the canvas type of the original painting and the canvas type of a replica. That is to say, Van Gogh’s Starry Night could be replicated on any type of canvas, whether it was oil, paper, or even on projection. In a single platform, Veeam® delivers its backup and recovery solutions for all environments including physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS, and Kubernetes. The ability of Veeam® to back up seamlessly independent of the environment removes the worry of compromising backup and recovery in time of infrastructure change.
Second, Veeam® delivers a customized backup regime. Users dictate the data and the respective frequency to back up according to various needs. For example, an entity may back up Office (Microsoft) 365 data every 4 hours for department A and every 12 hours for department B, and every 5 minutes for department C. Such a customized approach allocates the right amount of resources to back up the right data at the right frequency. The ability of Veeam® to provide a customized backup regime allows an entity to achieve maximum backup and recovery results and optimize its resources.
Third, Veeam® comes with a built-in backup encryption feature. In the case of data loss due to cyberattacks, it is paramount to ensure that the data be rendered unreadable in the hands of the perpetrator. However, many backup and recovery solutions require customers to purchase backup encryption separately. With Veeam®, a built-in feature triply encrypts backup data; once during backup at source, once during transmission to storage and once at the destination of storage. The ability of Veeam® to provide inherent backup encryption forms the final armour of data protection.
It is for these features that we believe Veeam® will help our customers to achieve the ultimate backup and recovery solution for their precious IT assets. Get in touch with us to design, deploy and manage your backup infrastructure with Veeam®!
