The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
Asigra, Inc.
Asigra, Inc.
The Typical Evolution of Data Protection in an Organization
People often put off buying life insurance until someone close to them passes away prematurely or a disaster strikes. Organizations approach data protection the same way: they often ignore protecting their data from loss until an unexpected data loss event occurs. Only then do they implement one or more “point solutions” specific to their most critical data sources. As time goes by, new data sources are added. Maybe new data protection point solutions are purchased for those new data sources, or maybe they are left unprotected. Either way, after a period of time, the organization is left with a complicated mix of data protection solutions and no easy way to confirm if all of its critical data is adequately protected from loss.
No organization ever plans to get to this state of data protection complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Rather, it’s a series of seemingly small decisions—decisions that seemed good at the time—that ultimately conspire to undermine an organization’s ability to adequately and efficiently protect its data in a cost effective way.
The Problems with Data Protection Point Solutions
Issue #1: Point solutions are just that—a solution, but only to a point
Point solutions are designed for one or a small handful of specific data protection use cases, such as backing up the data on one particular vendor’s brand of database, or only virtual machines.
Point solutions may work very well for the use cases for which they were designed, but they are generally useless for other scenarios. For those other use cases, you need to spend vast amounts of time researching, evaluating, procuring, training on and deploying different data protection solutions.
Issue #2: Point solutions are rarely unified
Unless point data protection solutions come from the same vendor, it’s unlikely they can be integrated or unified (and even then there are no guarantees). IT admins need to learn how to use different tools, will be less productive due to context switch between them, and deal with multiple vendors. Organizations might try to have different people specialize in different tools, but all it takes is a data loss event occurring while that one specialized recovery expert is on sick leave or vacation and they will wish knowledge had been more widely shared.
Issue #3: Point solutions don’t provide organization-wide transparency or control
As a result of point #2, point solutions provide neither an organization-wide view nor organization-wide control of your data protection. It’s like the old story of the elephant and the blind men, where each man touched a different part of the elephant and perceived something different than his peers. If you are unable to see a complete and coherent picture of all your organization’s protected data sources and their protection status in real time, you can’t tell if all of those data sources are being adequately protected.
White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
You have critical data scattered throughout your organization—on back-office servers, desktops, mobile endpoints outside your firewall, and even in public clouds like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. What steps have you taken to ensure none of that critical data will be lost? If you are like many organizations, you have deployed a hodge-podge of heterogeneous data protection solutions over the years as new data sources were added. The result is that you now have an overall, organization-wide data protection system that is highly complex. Even worse, you really can’t be certain that you don’t have serious data protection gaps somewhere in your organization. You could maintain the status quo and hope disaster will not strike. But this white paper offers a better plan: a single, comprehensive data protection platform that gives you transparent visibility and complete control over all your corporate data sources.
Asigra, Inc.
Issue #4: Point solutions’ protection levels are rarely consistent
Technologies provided by different vendors will almost certainly offer different levels of protection. Even if the protection level is the same—guaranteed recovery of lost data for example—the recovery times will likely differ. This isn’t necessarily a problem unless, for example, you have two data sources that are equally important to your organization but are being protected differently. Is the different treatment acceptable, or was a compromise made and one of the data sources is actually suffering from inadequate protection?
Issue #5: Point solutions are expensive
Data protection point solutions often come with a lot of hidden direct costs, such as having to pay for add-on and complementary tools such as virtual machine replication, mobile device management and billing modules. In addition, each point solution will have its own license model—by user, by device, or by processor core—that may require you to buy more capacity than you need leading to unnecessary costs. And of course, by spending across multiple vendors, or even multiple solutions from the same vendor, you likely won’t enjoy the kind of volume discount you would receive from a single data protection solution from a single vendor.
How Comprehensive Data Protection Works Better
Many organizations struggle with the complexities and inadequacies of data protection point solutions. The good news is there is a proven, effective way to comprehensively protect all of your organization’s critical data sources, including:
■ Physical and virtual servers
■ Databases
■ Applications
■ Mobile endpoints
■ Public SaaS-based applications like Salesforce, MS Office 365 or Google Apps
■ Public infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure
Upgrading your organization’s data protection solution to Asigra Cloud Backup™ provides this and more. Asigra Cloud Backup gives you full organization-wide visibility into the status of all your protected data sources, so that you can be sure there are no protection gaps, or immediately identify them and take action.
Figure 1 provides an architectural overview of how Asigra Cloud Backup protects your data. Two key points:
Figure 1
Customer LAN
Data Center
Laptops
Desktops
Server
Enterprise AppsVMWare
Databases
AgentlessDS-Client
Online Storage Archive Storage
DS-Billing
BLM
ProductionDS-LIcense Server
DS-NOC
How to use DS-Tablet
RESTORE NOWBACKUP NOW
VIEW LOGS DELETE FILESEDIT SELECTIONSCHEDULE
Tablets &Smartphones
Cloud-basedSaaS Apps
Cloud-basedPlatforms
How to use DS-Tablet
RESTORE NOWBACKUP NOW
VIEW LOGS DELETE FILESEDIT SELECTIONSCHEDULE
STATUS BAR
DS-System
EmergencyLicense Server
White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
Figure 2
Asigra, Inc.White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
■ Your corporate data sources, both inside and outside your firewall, are automatically and agentlessly backed up according to rules you define
■ Each backup data set is encrypted, compressed, and de-duped before being sent to a secure data center of your choice off in the cloud (usually that data center is located remotely for disaster recovery purposes and managed by your designated service provider, but it could just as easily be your own on-site or off-site private or hybrid cloud)
Although Asigra Cloud Backup is a single comprehensive solution, it doesn’t force one-size-fits-all protection on your data sources. Instead, you have full control and flexibility to set the level of protection that meets your organizational objectives, on a granular basis. For example, perhaps you want email from your Sales department to be backed up daily, email from all other departments to be backed up weekly, and production databases to be backed up hourly. You can easily establish such custom backup rules for these and any other data sources in your organization using the Asigra Cloud Backup dashboard (Figure 2).
“The recovery performance with Asigra Cloud Backup is exceptional. Gone are the days of taking tapes offsite to Iron Mountain for storage, or needing to bring several versions of tape in for recoveries because of inevitable backup failure. Data that used to take days to recover now is back in minutes.”
Roger Carroll Vice President, Information Services
Hilldrup Moving & Storage
Another clear benefit of the single comprehensive data protection solution approach: your IT admin staff only needs to train on one data protection tool. While this helps reduce your costs and enables IT admin staff to become more efficient at day-to-day data protection tasks, the real advantage comes during a data loss event. It will be easier to find someone among your IT admin staff with the necessary recovery skills, and he or she will be highly knowledgeable in how to perform the recovery quickly.
Why Asigra Cloud Backup is the Best Choice for Comprehensive Data Protection
Comprehensive data protection offers clear advantages over a point solution approach, but not all data protection solutions are the same. Here are six important considerations to evaluate:
1. Fair and flexible pricing — With Asigra Cloud Backup, licensing costs are based on the total amount of data stored in your backup data vault, after compression and global deduplication, which can easily shrink your raw data size significantly, even for binary files. Asigra Cloud Backup also uses Incremental Forever technology so only the first backup of a data source is fully stored in the backup data vault—after that, backups are based on the delta between the current version of the data source and the state it was in when the last backup was taken. The result is that your licensing costs are a small fraction of what they would be with other vendors that charge based on raw data size. In addition, with the patent pending Asigra Recovery License Model® (RLM) you pay less when you recover less. With RLM, organizations that implement their own best practices for handling and storing data can expect to save up to 50% versus traditional backup and recovery licensing models.
2. Data security — Under the US government HIPAA/HIGHTEC regulations, healthcare data such as patient records must be encrypted according to NIST FIPS 140-2 standards to ensure the data is useless to anyone not authorized to access it. But many data protection solutions aren’t NIST FIPS 140-2 compliant, which means the organizations using those point solutions could face compliance severe penalties if audited. Asigra Cloud Backup is fully NIST FIPS 140-2 compliant, ensuring your data is always secure, both in transit and at rest in the backup data vault.
3. Built-in geo-location and remote data wipe for mobile devices — Every day, thousands of mobile devices are lost or stolen. What if one of them has your corporate data on it? Built-in geo-location and remote data wipe functions can help keep it safe. The geo-location functionality in Asigra Cloud Backup lets you visually locate all of your protected mobile devices using an intuitive Google Maps interface (Figure 3), so you can judge at a glance whether a lost or stolen mobile device is in the wrong hands—and with the click of a button, proactively delete your corporate data before an unauthorized person accesses it. Only data that has been previously backed up to Asigra Cloud Backup can be remotely wiped from the device, which helps organizations with BYOD policies retain full control over corporate data while leaving employee’s personal data alone.
Asigra, Inc.White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
“We depend on several financial applications to maintain regular business operations. Because we get audited by the state for adherence to compliance mandates, the data encryption and security features of Asigra Cloud Backup are critical. We particularly value its recognition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where it has received FIPS 140-2 certification, placing it among the top in terms of data safety.”
Samuel Robinson IS Manager for Goodwill Industries
South Florida
Asigra, Inc.White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
4. Built-in virtual machine replication Asigra Cloud Backup provides several options for protecting virtual machines, including:
■ Point-in-time backups of virtual machines—Recover the entire machine or individual files as needed
■ Virtual machine replication for VMware without backup—Snapshots of the source are replicated to one or more targets according to your schedule so that in the event of an outage, a replica VM up and running in as little as 5 minutes
■ Virtual machine replication synchronized with point-in-time backups
5. Agentless architecture Asigra Cloud Backup does not use agents to protect data sources on your LAN. Instead, an application called the DS-Client runs on a physical server, virtual server, or Docker container connected to your LAN and orchestrates backup and recovery operations for all data sources connected to the LAN (Figure 1). This provides three big benefits:
1. Less administration overhead for your IT admins because there is nothing to install, configure, or maintain on the data sources themselves
2. Backup agents won’t compete for resources on the data source machines (e.g. a peak application load happens to coincide with a scheduled backup operation)
3. Better data security because you are not opening any ports for agents that could be compromised
6. Tiered recovery strategy for backup data In some instances, it’s critical you keep backup data—such as a legacy accounting system, data records and all—for many years to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. Asigra Cloud Backup makes it possible to minimize overall costs. With Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM), you can set rules to automatically move old, rarely accessed backup data to less expensive storage options.
Figure 3
“We needed to see fast ROI from the savings in man hours that were historically used to manage our tape backup system. Our tape based solution was difficult to manage, as well as time-consuming, and there were also constant hardware problems. With the Asigra solution, we’re very happy with the local and remote recovery capabilities of the system, which provided rapid recovery in the event of data loss or natural disaster.”
Jeff McGrath Vice President, Information Services
Planes Companies
Recommended Migration Path
One common migration approach is to start using Asigra Cloud Backup for a currently unprotected data source. For example, suppose your organization has recently adopted a SaaS-based service like Microsoft Office 365 or is running Docker containerized apps on Amazon Web Services. These are both critical corporate data sources that are often under protected or not protected within the corporate data protection strategy. Using Asigra Cloud Backup you can immediately start protecting your data residing in these applications while you continue to use your legacy point solutions to protect your older data sources. And then moving forward, as natural opportunities arise – such as a system upgrade or expiration of contracts for your point solutions – you can migrate older data sources to the Asigra Cloud Backup platform with minimal effort, at which point you can eliminate your legacy point solutions including their costs.
In Conclusion
Organizations often try to meet their data protection needs with a complicated mix of point solutions that in aggregate, don’t optimally protect all of the organization’s critical data. How an organization got there isn’t important. What is critical is that the organization recognizes the inherent flaws with a data protection strategy based on point solutions and understand how the right comprehensive all-in-one data protection software platform can address those flaws.
With Asigra Cloud Backup, organizations benefit from an industrial-strength, award-winning, agentless data protection platform that is trusted by Fortune 500 companies around the world to protect their data, while providing 100% recovery assurance, lower costs and peace of mind.
White paper: The Business Value of a Comprehensive All-in-One Data Protection Solution for Your Organization
Asigra, Inc.
About AsigraTrusted since 1986, Asigra provides organizations around the world the ability to recover their data now from anywhere through a global network of partners who deliver cloud backup and recovery services as public, private and/or hybrid deployments. As the industry’s fi rst enterprise-class agentless cloud-based recovery software to provide data backup and recovery of servers, virtual machines, endpoint devices, databases and applications, SaaS and IaaS based applications, Asigra lowers the total cost of ownership, reduces recovery time objectives, eliminates silos of backup data by providing a single consolidated repository, and provides 100% recovery assurance. Asigra’s revolutionary patent-pending Recovery License Model provides organizations with a cost effective data recovery business model unlike any other offered in the storage market. Asigra has been recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor and has been included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software since 2010. In 2014, Asigra Cloud Backup was also named the Top Enterprise Backup Solution by Storage Magazine. More information on Asigra can be found at www.asigra.com.
More information on Asigra can be found at www.recoveryiseverything.com
© 2015 Asigra Inc. Asigra, the Asigra logo, Asigra Cloud Backup, Recovery is Everything, and Recovery Tracker are all trademarks of Asigra Inc. Recovery License Model is a registered trademark of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. [02/15]
