The Modernisation of Data Protection

Data protection is a key business function that enables business owners and executives to sleep safe at night knowing that in the event of data loss their data can be recovered back to an acceptable recovery point, providing regular recovery testing is taking place! 

For many businesses in this day and age an acceptable recovery point is no longer days or hours but minutes or even seconds and that's due to how essential data now is to businesses in the data age. This is a result of the way data is being generated via all of us and our owned devices, that data is then harvested via organisations to gain competitive advantage and grow businesses further.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and Tesla are the sorts of companies who are leaders of the data economy and are harvesting data to its full extent and continue to find ways of growing their business via data.

In the data age many organisations are modernising data protection, here's 5 of the key the reasons why it's a very positive thing to do. 

• Lower Costs - The per unit costs of backup solutions have come down, quite a bit actually.  This means that long term costs are not growing nearly as fast with newer solutions and a good way to keep costs under control.
• Improved Performance - Newer solutions provide better performance specifically around RPOs / RTOs or the speed to backup and recover.
  In addition they are adding more flexibility for recovering data faster and more simply with the inclusion of things like VROs and GROs.
• Easier Management - Management of these new solutions has become easier based on a number of capabilities including virtual deployments, agentless solutions with API integration and self-service capabilities.
• Cloud Enablement - Today’s data protection solutions are also able to extend into the cloud simply and easily.

But let's take a look at the most interesting reason from my perspective which is enhanced business agility.

Above I described some of the world's leading organisations and how they are harvesting data.
Some of the most valuable data within your existing infrastructure is currently sat static in a locked and guarded treasure chest.

*Disclaimer, I'm not stating all backup admins are drunken pirates here! Only some - you know who you are.
Arrr me mateys! Yes it's your insurance policy, your backup data, sat static and not being proactively harvested for the many things it could be such as:

• Test and development
• DevOps
• Reporting
• Analytics
• DR testing and more

Spectrum Protect Plus and Spectrum Copy Data Management both provide the ability to quickly, simply and securely reuse data in your backup repository in a manner that lets IT keep track of these data copies and maintain compliance, avoid data sprawl and provide tools that give better visibility and cleanup for data in the environment. 

Let us unlock the potential of that data via modernising your data protection strategy with Spectrum Protect Plus and Spectrum Copy Data Management. 

Interested in learning more about how we can help you modernise your data protection strategies with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management? 
Come and speak to me at IBM THINK on the 14th of November where my colleague Richard Wallace and I will be on a booth in the modern infrastructure campus discussing and demoing how you can how we can enable you to modernise your data protection strategies.
Alternatively if you're not planning to attend get in contact with me via wbush@catalogicsoftware.com

On a personal note it's been a bit of a whirlwind 4 months for me personally with the arrival of our second child and also switching jobs at the start of August.

I really enjoyed my time with Tectrade over the last 7 years who were a top company to work for and have some great people in the company, I wish them all the best for the future.
But I moved on as I got given an opportunity to join the team and help enable the growth of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management which was too much of an interesting opportunity for me to turn down.
Was it the right move? Time will tell. But I'm very much enjoying myself thus far working for the first time with a vendor instead of inside the channel which I had been doing for the past 12 years.
My feet have barely touched the ground with several designs and deployments completed already. Planes, trains and automobiles have seen plenty of use via me with over 10,000 miles traveled in under 3 months.
Hopefully I will see you on my travels soon. Until the next time keeping #attackingtheday Cheers, Will