Cloud and Data Protection: Why You Need Aggregated Metrics and Analytics

Protecting a business is a challenging task and it can be overwhelming trying to keep up with the latest technology and IT trends.  From reducing risk to decreasing operating costs and/or capital expenses, it’s no wonder that IT leaders are struggling to supervise backup operations and predict the needs of protection infrastructure across multiple locations.

Michel Nader Regional Director, Middle East, Turkey & Africa
Michel Nader Regional Director, Middle East, Turkey & Africa

Hybrid Cloud has recently become a hot topic in the market, especially for enterprise IT where many corporations have been given a mandate to keep a certain percentage of their IT infrastructure in the Cloud. But unfortunately, simply deploying the Cloud for data protection is not enough, and this in itself actually presents a potential problem because the Cloud creates copy data as a result of hundreds of production databases supporting every aspect of the business.

It therefore becomes a challenge to determine whether the data is being adequately protected or not.

Copy sprawl is estimated to consume 45% of overall storage capacity and will cost businesses over $50 billion by 2018 – more information here.

In addition to copy sprawl, the distributed nature of the infrastructure makes it difficult to anticipate the capacity needs, and performance bottlenecks, within a business’s protection ecosystem.

Today, 82% of businesses have at least 10 copies of any one production instance of data. So to solve this copy data problem, businesses must have a modern data management system which focuses on optimizing infrastructure efficiency, streamlining operations, and meeting service level demands.

Cloud and Analytics Go Hand-in-Hand. 

Aggregated metrics and analytics can easily be introduced to your Cloud infrastructure with Dell EMC’s new Analytics-as-a-Service offering called Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA). This Cloud-based analytics engine will ingest data from across your enterprise and provide actionable insights to proactively optimize infrastructure, giving you the freedom to make data-driven decisions.

An ideal cloud analytics offering for data protection, should provide key features that allows the IT management team to effectively identify and address problems with their data management operations and protection infrastructure. These include:

  • Global view maps – Users are able to view every data center in their enterprise, including the ability to intimately look into each site for additional context, thus being able to identify bottlenecks, unprotected data copies, and deduplication ratios.
  • Health scores – These are used to convey the status of a business’s protection operations and infrastructure. The generated scores are used to delineate the health of copy data protection or protection infrastructure by using the analytics service to flag databases and lower the score for affected sites.
  • Capacity analysis – This is vital to understanding and predicting the future needs of your protection infrastructure by making use of historical data and predictive modeling, thus effectively determining when a business will reach capacity or experience performance issues.

Data Protection Your Way

The Cloud offers infinitely scalable resources that when 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 and ultimately lower costs throughout their data protection environment. And by deploying Hybrid Cloud in conjunction with aggregated metrics and analytics we can improve a business’ resiliency for many years to come.

See all of Dell EMC’s data protection solutions here.

About the Author: Dell Technologies