Almost half of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) now have a hybrid environment that combines both virtual and physical servers.
The result? The creation of data protection complexities that must be addressed to ensure business continuity and data security.
“Data protection is different for physical and virtual environments,” says Lincoln Goldsmith, General Manager A/NZ, Acronis.
“Because of the differences in infrastructure, operation and management between virtual and physical environments, each requires a different technology and approach to protect data.
“SMBs face many challenges when trying to protect data in their hybrid environment as most of the data protection products on the market are not comprehensive, easy to use, or affordable.”
For example, Goldsmith says that traditional data protection platforms claim to protect hybrid environments with one solution but there are several problems with that approach for SMBs.
“It creates a single point of failure, which means if it fails, all backup operations are down,” he explains.
“In a disaster recovery situation, you must also install and configure the backup server first before restoring the production workloads, increasing the time it takes to recover from a disaster.
“Perhaps most importantly, these platforms are typically too expensive for most SMBs with upfront and maintenance costs, as well as hidden costs such as the time it takes to manage such a complex system.”
According to Goldsmith, new generation data protection products have been developed specifically to combat this problem for SMBs.
An integrated suite of products provides unified control, management and reporting for the entire environment, regardless of the organisation’s size, the number of data types, and the number and types of operating system platforms and applications.
Goldsmith believes using a solution like this means the system administrator would use only one interface, see all the machines, and have the ability to apply global, group, or individual policies.
In addition, the system administrator can manage all physical and virtual machines locally or remotely, assign backup policies to one or multiple machines and also review status updates, generate reports and receive alerts from a single console.
“As organisations scale their environment and operations, their data protection solutions should scale with them,” Goldsmith adds.
“While SMBs now have a mixture of physical and virtual machines, they must minimise costs, and improve both IT and user productivity. A next generation data protection solution helps SMBs to ensure continuity of IT operations.”
