As a technology analyst, I tend to first look for and cover new product features and technologies. However, the latest product features and technologies only go so far, especially when deploying them in enterprises.
There eventually comes a point when enterprises say, “Enough! We need better options to manage all the features and technologies we have already acquired.” More technology providers have heard and responded to this cry for help. While providers still strive to introduce innovative features and technologies, many now seek to sustain this innovation through cloud consoles.
Point Solutions Remain the Lifeblood of Innovation
Point solutions tend to be the lifeblood of innovation in every technology sector. Organizations of all size regularly encounter some new challenges that require some new product feature or technology. While they prefer their existing technology providers address them, these providers may:
- Give these new features or technologies a low priority to implement.
- Pay lip service by promising to fix them and then do nothing.
- Put lipstick on some existing feature or technology and claim that change addresses the issue.
Suffice to say, responses like these tend to only fuel the fires of start-ups and help keep analysts in business. These result in point solutions coming to market that solve these problems. Further, they may save substantial amounts of money and/or time and may even create whole new industries.
The Downside of Point Solutions
Unfortunately, simply throwing a point solution at every problem that comes along has its own set of downsides. Trying to individually manage every point solution creates its own set of costs and overhead.
For instance, point solutions may require specialized knowledge, software licensing, or both to implement and manage. These types of requirement preclude organizations from deploying them at scale.
Due to their specialized nature, organizations may not even realize they own a specific technology or who manages it. I am aware of one instance where an employee was let go from a company.
Shortly after his departure, his manager received frantic calls from the team he used to support. They no longer had access to a critical application they needed to do business. After some investigation, the manager learned the employee hosted the application on his PC. Turning his PC back on fixed the problem.
However, this example helps illustrate the specific challenge of point solutions. If organizations forget about the problems they address or cannot even find or manage them, their usefulness diminishes.
The Rise of Cloud Consoles
In response to these issues associated with managing their innovation, more providers now take a cloud centric path. The recent introduction of cloud consoles from Arcserve and HYCU represent how providers simultaneously innovate while facilitating centralized management.
Arcserve UDP 9.0
In Arcserve’s case, as part of its recent Unified Data Protection (UDP) 9.0 release, it announced numerous innovations. It also released a Cloud Console to help manage them. On the innovation side, it included new options for organizations to perform full or granular recovery of Oracle Pluggable Databases (PDBs).
It also strengthened UDP 9.0’s backup and recovery features for Microsoft SQL Server. It takes an extra step for SQL Server backups when performing consistency checks on them. If the consistency check fails, it generates an alert and marks the backup as unusable for restores.
Along with these innovations, it also introduced a Cloud Console to equip companies to consolidate and centralize backups. Arcserve hosts and maintains this console in a cloud data center. Delivered this way IT personnel do not have to manually deploy or install it or spend extended amounts of time configuring it. Rather, they may quickly log in and use its interface to perform tasks that help lock down their backups. These tasks include:
- Creating and defining backup policies.
- Configuring the infrastructure, source groups, and user access controls.
- Managing account resources, to include user management.
- Monitoring and analyzing backup and recovery jobs throughout the organization.
The Cloud Console also takes steps to lock out bad actors. To secure each individual’s access to the Cloud Console and organizational backups, it uses strong authentication. IT personnel must use multifactor authentication (MFA) to access the UDP Cloud Console. The UDP Cloud Console authenticates each login through its MFA integration with Okta. This MFA authentication verifies each user’s identity and counters possible attacks by bad actors.
HYCU R-Cloud and Protégé
HYCU innovated by providing a scalable and efficient approach to backing up data stored in software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
HYCU recognized that internally developing the code to protect the thousands of available SaaS applications represented a practical impossibility. So rather than tackling the impossible, HYCU offers a no-charge backup module that any SaaS provider may embed in its SaaS. HYCU has found that a SaaS provider can complete this integration process in as quickly as three days. Further, organizations may also request and embed this module in SaaS apps they create in-house. They may also request that their SaaS providers contact HYCU to embed this freely available backup module in their SaaS.
Yet once its backup module gets deploy, HYCU does not leave organizations without a means to centrally manage backup. HYCU also offers its HYCU R-Cloud cloud management console in which organizations first create a free account. They create an R-Cloud using their existing Active Directory or Okta permissions. R-Cloud and, by extension, HYCU Protégé, then uses these permissions to interface with the various SaaS providers. It then discovers the data in this SaaS providers that requires backup and provides the option to back this data up.
Cloud Consoles Now Integral to Managing Today’s Innovation
Organizations that want to solve today’s backup and recovery challenges need innovative technologies to do so. However, innovation alone no longer suffices. Centralized management, now often delivered in the form of a cloud console, must accompany today’s innovations.
The recent announcements from Arcserve and HYCU both talk about innovations they released to help companies better protect their data. Yet both of these providers just as importantly announced the availability of cloud consoles that centralize management. This combination of cloud consoles and innovation ensure that organizations can do more than solve their specific challenges. The cloud consoles ensure organizations can sustainably administer this innovation no matter where they deploy it in their environment.
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