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Current Filter: Cloud>>>>>Technology Focus> Restoring faith Editorial Type: Technology Focus Date: 07-2015 Views: 4085 Key Topics: Cloud Backup Data protection Deduplication Virtualisation Compliance Key Companies: NetApp Key Products: AltaVault Key Industries: Insurance | |||
| The backup and recovery industry is developing rapidly - and it's moving to the cloud, says Martin Warren, Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager at NetApp The backup and recovery industry has come on leaps and bounds over the past few decades. Traditionally, thousands of space-hungry tapes filled the data centre floor and data centre managers worked within specific backup windows to carry out their daily and weekly backups. As the volume of data within enterprises increased, things started to change. The backup process required more and more time to complete, putting pressure on backup windows, applications and overall IT performance. As tape struggled to meet the requirements for primary backup and disk was becoming far cheaper, disk-to-disk backup started to take over as the primary backup layer, with tape increasingly being relegated to deep-archive. For IT Directors, the importance of backing up is not something that needs to be highlighted - the need to safeguard against data loss and data corruption is very real, especially as the increase in data volumes shows no signs of abating. Today, a key priority for enterprises is balancing price and performance by determining which data is most important and most frequently accessed and where it should sit within the storage hierarchy. For organisations looking to backup as economically and efficiently as possible, there have traditionally been a number of challenges to take into account. These include time constraints, security issues and management requirements, as well as CapEx and OpEx considerations of cost and capacity. These challenges have caused the backup and recovery industry to develop apace.
DEMANDING TIMES The rapid rise of cloud-based backup and recovery solutions has been the result of these demands. Recent research from industry analysts shows that three of the Top 10 IT spending priorities in 2015 will involve data protection. Cloud-based backup is increasingly being seen as a first step in addressing these priorities, closely followed by the deployment of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, also in the cloud. This is primarily due to the economics, elasticity and agility of the cloud, which makes it an ideal platform for backup and recovery and other aspects of data protection.
PRESERVING EXISTING INVESTMENTS AltaVault is compatible with 85% of leading backup software vendors, which means that existing investments are preserved and the need for training is minimised. The AltaVault solution is available in physical and virtual appliance forms, and is also offered in the cloud as a pay-as-you-go virtual appliance via Amazon Web Services, shortly to be followed by Microsoft Azure. One example of a company that is deploying AltaVault is Blach Construction, a construction company based in Northern California. As Blach grew and expanded, so did its data, driving the need to find a cost-effective backup and recovery strategy to safeguard this vital asset. Backup storage was Blach's first foray into the public cloud. As a result, it saves 20 business hours per month, which the IT team previously spent monitoring backup jobs, tweaking its devices and managing connectivity issues with the SANs. Now, the IT team is able to focus more on supporting their construction sites.
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