How to Choose the Right Data Protection Strategy for Your Hybrid Data Center

Hybrid data centers are becoming the norm, capturing all the benefits of virtualization, cloud, and software-defined solutions spanning your data center, public, and private clouds. The hybrid cloud market alone reached $52 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow to $145 billion in 2026.

Taking a hybrid approach gives you the flexibility to easily store and move your workloads around as needed while giving you more control over your sensitive data. And hybrid clouds offer cost-efficiency with on-demand pricing. Most importantly, a hybrid approach gives you fast scalability and effective application governance options.

Hybrid Environments Bring Challenges

Hybrid environments also add new complexities as you manage servers, storage, networks, and software across your infrastructure. Data protection comes into play, too, as you need to secure applications and data both in the cloud and on-premises. You must also be able to recover your applications and data either in the cloud or on-premises, regardless of where they live today. And the ability to manage your backup and recovery capabilities across your entire environment is an absolute requirement.

Criteria for Effective Hybrid Data Protection Solutions

In a recent Technology Report, DCIG president and founder Jerome Wendt points out five attributes you should consider when it comes to data protection for your hybrid data center.

Control Access to Backup Software

Your selected backup software should require authorization and authentication using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and identity and access management (IAM) to control and monitor access to backups. Requiring multiple approvals for crucial tasks like changing backup schedules or deleting backups is also important.

Easy, Immutable Storage Management

Choose backup software that makes it easy to manage your immutable storage, a vital part of a 3-2-1-1 backup strategy, and your best bet for defending against ransomware because your backups can’t be altered or deleted. You’ll also want to leverage the object lock feature available in most public clouds that provides similar functionality to on-premises immutable storage.  

Employ Backup Scans to Fight Ransomware

An ideal solution should let you scan your backups for ransomware since it can—and often does—slip past cybersecurity defenses. By scanning your data for ransomware during backups and recoveries and providing alerts if encountered, you add another layer of data protection to your environment.

Flexible Deployment Options

You’ll need several backup options in your hybrid data center to perform backups in the cloud, on-premises, or both. You’ll get the most flexibility with a solution that includes backup appliances (physical, virtual, or both) and backup as a service (BaaS).

Workload Mobility

Because your workloads may reside in the cloud, on-premises, or both, you need a data protection solution that identifies where the workload is backed up and recognizes the environment into which it will be recovered. This capability is critical for recovering workloads regardless of where it resides.

APIs Add Efficiency

The environments where your workloads reside offer multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) for management. Backup software that leverages these APIs may back up and recover virtual machines (VMs) more effectively and efficiently.

Choose Centralized Backup Management

A centralized backup management console is the linchpin for implementing an effective data protection strategy for your hybrid data center. With integrated backup software and a centralized backup software console you can manage backup and recovery across your hybrid data center from anywhere.

The solution you choose should identify the workloads that run in each environment, recognize the service-level agreements (SLAs) that apply to each environment, and set policies for each and across your entire environment.

Meet Hybrid Data Center Challenges Head-On

In the DCIG Technology Report, Wendt concludes by writing, “Arcserve’s management and security features collectively position organizations to meet the dynamic data protection requirements of a hybrid data center.”

Click here to read the complete DCIG report, “Getting Data Protection Right in a Hybrid Data Center.”

To learn more about Arcserve hybrid data center data protection solutions, choose an expert Arcserve technology partner or contact us for product information.