The last enterprise company at which I worked used at least five different products to do backup and there may have been more. This amalgamation of backup products occurred over a period of years and mostly by happenstance.
Acquisitions of and mergers with other companies; internal consolidations; specific backup requirements for certain applications; and, as often as not, the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, contributed to the company ending up with a menagerie of backup products to manage. Yet, as any user who works for an enterprise is aware, this situation occurs more common than not as many enterprises use multiple backup products in their environment.
The problem is that the environment in which enterprises find themselves has changed significantly in the last few years. While in the past this has created management headaches, now having this many backup platforms presents a significant risk to enterprise corporations.
Aside from the difficulty of recovering the data should a disaster strike, the more real threat is from electronic discoveries and legal holds that can result from laws like the recently amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). These laws put the onus on companies to retain and preserve corporate data, backup or otherwise, for indeterminate periods of time, that can become nearly impossible to comply with when multiple backup platforms are involved.
So what options does an enterprise have? In these situations, the last thing that it may want to do is introduce yet another backup platform into their environment. Introducing a fifth or sixth backup platform into one’s environment is probably not in anyone’s best interest since for every problem it solves, it probably creates just as many problems and makes the environment more complex, not less.
Reducing the number of platforms to one isn’t always an option either. Enterprises may need to keep 2 or 3 backup platforms in their environment to address specific application needs. They may have also made a business decision to keep multiple products in-house so they can ensure a competitive environment between vendors exists.
In these circumstances, enterprises should consider Asigra’s Televaulting as one of the backup and recovery platforms to use as one of the two or three to which they consolidate and use as part of their overall data protection strategy for two reasons. Its agentless architecture makes it easy to implement to protect the large number of application, file and print servers that enterprises need to backup but which do not contain data deemed mission-critical. It also is economical. Televaulting is not licensed by the number of servers but by total managed capacity after the data is deduplicated. This licensing minimizes the cost associated with protecting these servers.
The other reason is that enterprises now have a greater need to create common backup stores and manage the data that is stored there. While backing up and restoring this data is important, keeping the data too long or expiring it when it is subject to a legal hold can be just as damaging to a business as never having backed the data up in the first place. Using Televaulting’s backup lifecycle management feature, companies can set policies that retain and expire backup sets in these dynamic environments. Because Televaulting’s architecture brings all of the data back from these disparate sources to one central backup data store, the task of managing this previously unmanaged enterprise backup data is simplified dramatically.