Protecting Virtualized Environments
I remember being at Marist College a few years ago completing my last assignment as an undergrad student called “capping”. Capping was a required course that all students had to take in order to graduate. It’s designed to bring together everything you’ve learned throughout your time at Marist and bring them to life through real-life scenarios. Graduating with a Finance degree meant I had to come up with a financial business plan and then present to my panel of “sharks”. It consisted of sales forecasts, expense budgets and cash flow statements but before I bore you, I’ll stop there. It was a very tedious course and students all around campus cringe at the thought of having to take it.
As part of this course Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop were required and offered in our lab, however, PCs running the software were antiquated and slow. The university virtualized all essential applications, including Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop. However, we had no guarantee that our projects were being backed up. This meant that every student had to put their projects on thumb drives – and hope it was not left behind or in my case ….lost. After looking for days on end and realizing I’d never see that thumb drive again I wasn’t sure which direction to go in next. I had weeks of work I’d never be able to access again simply because of my data being unprotected. Using the thumb drive backup method to control the backup of any project was not ideal. I’m sure you’ve run into similar constraints either at work or in your personal life.
vAdmins and IT managers are struggling to meet their company’s requirements and traditional backup and recovery strategies just aren’t enough to deliver the recovery that businesses now need. In fact, 71% of those surveyed are not confident they could recover systems.
Although moving towards a virtualized environment has resulted in great efficiencies for businesses, there have also been new challenges brought about by this technology. The jump in data growth on top of the increasing number of virtual machines has created the need for an effective means to manage and protect these environments. Mission critical applications are being deployed within a virtual context which means a higher demand for data protection. Although virtualized environments enable faster provisioning of applications and resources, the data still needs to be protected. In my case, because my data went unprotected I had to duplicate efforts and get an extension from my professor who fortunately understood the situation.
To ensure this does not happen to your business you need to find a data protection solution that you can count on. EMC offers a unique solution in the market that offers end-to-end protection including backup and recovery, continuous data protection for any PiT recovery, proactive monitoring and analysis, and search capabilities, offering the breadth of data protection required to meet your most demanding SLAs. Transforming into a virtualized environment is important and beneficial in many ways, but making sure it’s protected could save you a lot of time and money down the road.