Endpoint Protection

Myth 1 – Data Protection Solutions Do Not Scale with my Business

Plenty has been said about the challenges that exist today for IT and data center managers. I will spare you the typical descriptions about the increase in mission-critical data, plain old exploding volumes of data, and data distributed across a dispersed workforce. We’re all well aware of these issues.

Let’s talk about the good news. There is a tremendous about of innovation in data protection technologies today. Take a second to think about everything you’ve heard about granular recovery, data deduplication, cloud-based storage, SaaS, innovative data protection technology for virtual environments, and continuous data protection. These are all technologies that can be applied to solve specific challenges in the context of a larger data protection platform, and IT folks are beginning to catch on to most of them. However, this innovation has come with quite a few myths that I’d like to dispel with a blog series about data protection technologies. I’ll take a stab at providing some insight into how organizations can use some of the latest and greatest technologies in data protection – and talk about the most common misperceptions.

For Myth Number One, I’d like to focus on scalability because of the aforementioned issue of increasing data volumes. Environments are becoming more complex and expanding at a mind-boggling pace. So, scalability is obviously an issue for most users. Often, organizations—particularly those whom are resource-constrained or have little or no in-house data protection expertise—tend to think they need to “rip and replace” data protection software as their business grows. In reality, there has been enough innovation to give users a more dynamic and scalable approach.  

So what is needed to find the right amount of scalability? Backup and recovery tools must include the capability to synchronize and manage data backups on multiple media servers and provide a central point of administration and control for job processing and load balancing. Whether an organization has just three media servers or more than 100, a central administration capability is essential to manage data protection operations across the entire backup environment. This will give users what they need to manage their IT infrastructure as it grows.

Centralized administration capabilities offer additional benefits to remote offices and departments, and give you the ability to replicate data from remote office servers to a central location at the corporate office, where data can be reliably backed up and stored.

An often overlooked, but ever-present pain point is the management of the data protection infrastructure itself—lifecycle management of agents and media servers, especially upgrading versions of product that are several major revisions old; centralization of license information, detection of unprotected resources, and real-time monitoring of data protection storage resources. These are some examples of where data protection solutions are broadening their offerings to solve some long-standing and very labor-intensive problems.

Keep checking back here more myths around data protection. We will tackle one each day over the next week to address everything from upgrading to disk-based backup, granular recovery technology to backing up virtual machines.

Jason Fisher
Director of Product Management, Symantec Backup Exec