By Bakshish Dutta, Country Sales Manager – India and SAARC, Druva
Today, most organizations are migrating to the cloud in an effort to improve efficiencies and scale with the help of digital transformation. Cloud adoption has been given a push due to the pandemic. According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 92 per cent of enterprises are considering a multi-cloud strategy for their organization, with the increasing adoption of more cloud-based applications to meet remote or hybrid work needs. The rise in cloud adoption has encouraged organizations today to improve data and business resilience in order to meet successful digital transformation without creating new vulnerabilities and risks. Organizations are now able to protect as well as recover data at ease with the use of virtual servers, databases across multiple cloud environments as well as business-critical applications.
The massive shift of moving to public cloud, has increased risk and concerns such as ransomware as well as other complexities in data management and backup. Hence, IT professionals are reassessing their traditional backup infrastructure so they are able to introduce more modern solutions with infinitely scalable protection.
The augmented growth of cloud data
Organization data is undoubtedly most critical to businesses today. Some of the key challenges are managing and storing this massive amount of crucial data in all different types and across the multi-cloud. The more complex the data gets, the more difficult it is to optimize the organizations’ data protection cost across different cloud deployments which adds to management and resourcing cost as well. On the other hand, lack of cloud skills is resulting in stifling advancement. A report by Gartner states that IT professionals express concerns that talent shortage is the largest barrier to deploy emerging technologies.
Here are five tips that organizations can consider to build a successful multi-cloud backup strategy:
- Consolidate the cloud backup vendors
When we use different backup vendors for different cloud platforms, there is a lack of centralized visibility across the cloud platforms. Fragmented point solutions can rapidly lead to data silos and failed SLAs (Service Level Agreement). This fragmentation increases the risk of backups being deleted by ransomware or insiders, data loss as a result of failed backups, and/or security breaches. While using many data products across the cloud environment makes centralized reporting as well as compliance difficult, it is equally important to consolidate the number of vendors. This also helps protect globally distributed data across multiple cloud platforms easily, consistently, and affordably.
- Centralize the data operations in the cloud
Centralizing the data operations in the cloud can help turn it into a business intelligence asset. It helps improve business resiliency. The organization can also make use of multiple value added services such as eDiscovery, cloud disaster recovery, defensible deletion and sensitive data governance.
- Automation of cloud tasks
Cloud automation helps streamline processes or any other task which improves efficiency and helps reduce manual workload as well. Automation helps organize and minimize IT needs drastically. Using automation has proven to be an efficient tool to complete based data resilience requirements with almost infinite scale.
- Cloud-native helps to make infrastructure management effortless
Whether an organization chooses an as-a-service or subscription cloud backup, how one implements the software in the cloud is what impacts the cost for the organization. It will seem to be less expensive to go for a particular company’s product and lift-and-shift it into your cloud account; however, all-inclusive services in the vendors’ cloud account are not very cost effective, particularly when both services and storage are covered. In addition to the cost of VMs (Virtual machine) and block storage, one is also responsible for maintaining and upgrading these systems. Additionally there is a constant threat of cyber-attacks and ransomware, hence monitoring them is equally important.
- Align with the organization’s cloud-first strategy
Data Protection policies need to be extended to existing cloud IT solution stack, so it can simplify operations. Undoubtedly, data for organizations is an asset in a multi- cloud environment. Employee data is at the heart of the organizations with shifts in how organizations function such as remote working and a mobile workplace. By encouraging API-based ecosystem integrations, IT teams are able to track new sources of data, improving businesses while reusing existing skills and resources to automate business processes.
Data resilience has always been an important component of a defense strategy and given today’s changing security landscape, it has become more critical than ever. Organizations must look for a security provider that brings the simplicity, scalability and security of the public cloud to enterprise data protection and data management. While data resiliency solutions provide backup and recovery, replication, and disaster recovery as one of its critical elements, it also captures the broader needs of an organization outside of this singular use case and reflects the fact that businesses need a more comprehensive approach such as securing data against malicious actors and maintaining compliance. Today, data resilience has become essential to achieve overall business resilience and thereby success that remains unmatched by any other.
