A Brave New World … System Backup and Security

IT environments continue to evolve as digital transformation sits at the core of most business strategies. Malcolm Mason, Cloud and Data expert at Sure discusses how in the midst of this advancement, the need to back up and protect systems and data hasn’t changed – but the way it can be done certainly has!

New cloud-based backup methodologies with advanced business continuity and security options provide enhanced protection from damaging security breaches, system downtime and service loss.

Traditionally, data backups are done during off-peak hours, as the resources used and time taken, would negatively impact operational performance during the day.

Digital economic growth has brought with it a huge increase in malicious and damaging cyberattacks, and the increased importance of data and intellectual property means security and business continuity are more important than ever.

Service … more important than ever

Workstyles have changed to meet growing customer service expectations, and IT departments must ensure system performance and availability at all times, as employees expect the same user experience, regardless of the time of day.

Traditional methodologies that copy and store data changes in a secondary location during off peak hours, are still being used by many organisations, and if an incident occurs, many hours of data can be lost before applications and systems are fully restored. 

Loss of data and productivity is business affecting, and perhaps the greatest fear today is adverse publicity and reputational damage, due to the ease with which negative feedback can be publicised across social media platforms.

System outages due to cyberattacks and plain old human error are the C-suite’s nightmare scenario, and having a replicated and geographically separate system in a ‘ready to go’ position, has until now, been very difficult to achieve.

Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Cloud computing has many transformative benefits, and new ways of protecting and recovering IT systems is one of them. Cloud enables a move from traditional periodic backup processes to one of continuous backup - where every update and change is replicated in real-time.

Recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) provides business continuity by eliminating harmful downtime and protecting business-critical data, with disaster recovery and risk mitigation brought together in an affordable and easy to manage solution.

Continuous Data Protection 

At its core, RaaS uses continuous data protection (CDP) - an ongoing process of replicated backup that has no impact on operations or user experience. In the event of an incident, systems can be reset in an instant to the latest and safest point in time before the outage, and should it be required, a rewind can be done to any point in time in the last 30 days.

Long Term Data Storage

Many organisations are governed by regulatory and compliance legislation that requires data to be stored for longer periods of time. RaaS negates the need to run information reports from the live environment, as up-to-the-minute data that’s stored in the replicated platform is used without any impact on operational performance.

Reporting and Compliance

RaaS system reporting provides a single comprehensive overview of the entire cloud environment with metrics showing real-time and historical information on the health and protection of applications and data. Dashboards identify trends, anomalies, and potential issues including the backup status of files, applications, and information - along with any compliance issues.

Credibility and Reputation

From a resource and cost perspective, it’s advantageous to bring together disaster recovery and data protection into a simple, easy to manage cloud solution. Having a regularly updated and automated recovery platform provides peace of mind in a world dogged by malicious cyberthreats.

Service interruptions are increasingly damaging, and minimising the impact of outages is essential. Should an incident occur, whether due to human error, hardware, or application failure - a RaaS solution enables the successful failover of operational workloads, protecting data, keeping things running and maintaining the reputation of the organisation.

Protection and Assurance

In partnership with Zerto, Sure has created a cost-effective cloud-based disaster recovery and backup platform that reduces downtime and data loss, protecting and mitigating businesses from the impact of system failures and providing uninterrupted technology assurance.

To discuss your specific requirements please email contactus@sure.com and our consultancy team will be in touch.