Trying to think of a New Years’ resolution? You could try that no-carb diet again, or head to the gym in preparation for the summer season. However, if you’re anything like me, those lifestyle-focused resolutions probably won’t last into the new month, let alone the New Year. So let’s think in terms of data protection: if your New Year’s resolution is focused on protecting your business, it should probably have something to do with reducing risk, reducing operating expenses, and/or reducing capital expenses. Especially if your business is a large, global enterprise, managing these three metrics pervade every aspect of your job.
You wouldn’t be alone – IT leaders in large enterprises are struggling to keep up. It is extremely difficult to supervise backup operations and predict the needs of protection infrastructure in data centers across multiple geographies. With potentially hundreds of production databases supporting every part of the business, how can IT management accurately determine that copies of these databases are meeting retention policies and SLAs? Without aggregated metrics, it is hard to determine whether or not data is being effectively protected in a given location. In addition, the distributed nature of the infrastructure makes it difficult to anticipate the capacity needs and performance bottlenecks within a business’s protection ecosystem.
If you want to work towards achieving your New Year’s resolution, you will need a simple and centralized way to view and analyze systems’ health across all data centers. The best way to meet those requirements is through a cloud analytics solution for data protection.
Cloud and analytics go together like icing and cake. The cloud offers infinitely scalable resources that are not limited to locations, installations, or hardware; these qualities make the cloud a perfect candidate for global-scope analytics applications. When these concepts are applied to data protection, something magical happens: IT leaders develop the ability to observe their protection systems’ health across all data centers and anticipate the needs of their global data protection infrastructure. With this ability, they are able to proactively address potentials risks and identify opportunities to increase efficiency to ultimately lower costs throughout their data protection environment.
How, you ask? Well, an ideal cloud analytics offering for data protection would provide global map views, health scores, and capacity analysis. These types of key features allow IT management to be able to effectively identify and address problems with their data management operations and protection infrastructure. Global map views would allow users to view every data center in their enterprise, with the ability to drill-down into each site for additional context into the exact infrastructure details. From there, users can see throughput bottlenecks, unprotected data copies, and deduplication ratios, among other metrics.
In addition, health scores should be available to convey the status of a business’s protection operations and infrastructure. For example, scores would be generated to delineate the health of copy data protection or protection infrastructure. If, for example, several production databases are not meeting a certain defined SLA, the analytics service would be able to identify and flag these databases and lower the score for that site.
Lastly, capacity analysis is vital to understanding and predicting the future needs of your protection infrastructure. Using historical data and predictive modeling, data protection analytics applications can effectively determine when a business will reach capacity or experience performance issues. This type of analysis can also detect anomalies and past trends.
Each of these features are critical to ensuring that IT leaders are well-informed when making business decisions to reduce risk, increase efficiency, and lower costs, regardless of how many sites may exist across the globe. As we near 2017, it’s time to think about the needs of your business and the ways you can improve its resiliency for years to come. It’s an excellent New Year’s resolution – you’ll just have to do some extra explaining at the New Years’ party.