For nearly two decades, StorageCraft has been innovating advanced data management, protection and recovery solutions. Together with our channel partners, we ensure medium and small organisations can keep their business-critical information always safe, accessible, and optimised. Our customers benefit from category-leading intelligent data protection and management solutions, converged primary and secondary scale-out storage platform and world-class cloud backup and DRaaS services. Regardless of whether an organisation relies on on-premises, cloud-based or a hybrid IT environment, StorageCraft solves the challenges of exploding data growth while ensuring business continuity through best in class protection and recovery solutions.
In its 2018 Global State of Remote Work study, Owl Labs found that 44 percent of companies don’t allow remote work. That was before the arrival of the novel coronavirus. Now, the new normal is working from home (WFH). Today there are millions of additional devices, managed and unmanaged, connecting to corporate networks from everywhere. That adds tremendous complexity to IT management, data security, and backup and recovery strategies. Indeed, data loss has rapidly escalated to become one of the greatest risks facing businesses. A recent CompTIA study found that 93 per cent of companies rated data as “important” or “very important” to business success Yet the cost of lost business due to a data breach was estimated at $1.9 million in Australia, and the hourly cost of downtime can be anywhere between $10,000 to $5 million, depending on the size of the company. These numbers can be a business-ending event for any organisation, highlighting the need to take data protection and disaster recovery seriously.
What every CIO should be asking of remote offices
According to a StorageCraft whitepaper, a CIO should be focused on answering the following questions when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery of remote and satellite locations:
- How much data is being generated and consumed in remote offices?
- Are your remote and branch offices being protected?
- How exposed are the remote sites in the event of a problem?
- Are you meeting all your regulators or compliance requirements?
- What tools and services are in use? Are these doing the job?
- Are you able to protect the data off-premises when site access is not available?
- Can you recover your data, and how quickly?
One of the key challenges facing organisations with remote sites is the lack of IT staff “on the ground” to enforce compliance and policy management. Many organisations are unaware of how much data is stored locally and not backed up within these environments.
A comprehensive backup and continuity system should account for physical, virtual, and cloud based application data, and those backups also need to be held off-site (to protect against the potential for physical damage and/or natural disasters) and accessible via the cloud (in an event where site access becomes impossible). This is why StorageCraft has launched the OneXafe Solo solution. Designed to be easy to deploy and manage for those environments that don’t have an on-site dedicated IT support, OneXafe Solo is a plug-and-protect direct to cloud backup appliance; as soon as it is connected to the Internet, the OneXafe Solo appliance begins securely backing up data to the StorageCraft Cloud Services datacenter.
Addressing challenges with data restoration
Organisations with disperse environments also need to contend with the challenges of undergoing data and systems restoration. Without any IT staff “on the ground” this process can be technically challenging and time-consuming.
Some of the key challenges that CIOs will need to prepare for if a restore is required include:
- An unmanaged environment. If backups aren’t automated and centralised, tracking down the data that needs to be restored can be time-consuming.
- Restoration failure. Statistics show that some 75 per cent of data restore efforts fail, often due to a combination of unmanaged environments, a lack of testing, and using legacy backup technologies that have high failure restore rates. Often an organisation may not realise that they lack a functional backup and restore solution until it’s too late.
- Ransonmware. Research shows that even after a ransom is paid, the organisation still experiences data loss. The frequency of which backups occur can also mean that there’s a “gap” where, if malware requires a data backup, that the most recent work done is lost.
StorageCraft’s OneXafe Solo has been designed to address these challenges through its set-and-forget management feature, which enforces SLA-based policy management into an environment. It supports agent and agentless backups for physical and virtual machines. It offers organisations complete peace of mind. When a restore is required for these critical environments, the entire systems can be recovered within minutes. Finally, in connecting with the StorageCraft’s Cloud-based Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), organisations are re-assured that theirdata and systems are available at all time.
Supporting the OneXafe Solo appliance, StorageCraft offers OneSystem management services, which provide organisations with real-time monitoring, reporting, and visibility from any location. OneSystem protects an organisation from the risk of a failed data restore effort by continually monitoring the health of OneXafe Solo in real time. This ensures that there are no incidents where a restore fails because of an unnoticed failed backup. OneSystem is cloud-based, so it can be managed from a Web browser, anywhere in the world, allowing for faster response time and 24/7 management.
Over half of organisations fail to complete daily backups of their environment, and the management of those backups becomes even more challenging with organisations that are geographically dispersed. By leveraging the cloud, and simple plug-and-play technologies that don’t rely on having IT resources on the ground, an organisation can take advantage of the opportunities available through remote working, without compromising the health and security of their staff and data.
For a limited time only, participate in the OneXafe Solo Try-then-Buy Program to get 45 days of coverage free of charge. Click here for more information!
