BTEX 2023: How Dell Data Domain Can Help Back Up and Protect Your Data
According to Dell’s Steve Weaver, about half of organizations are not confident in their ability to perform a recovery from their backups, which is concerning since backups remain key to recover from any adverse event – not just a cyberattack.
“10 years ago, people weren't worried about cyberattacks, but today, they’re all the rage,” said Steve Weaver, Solutions Consultant at Dell, speaking at CDW Canada’s 2023 Business Technology Expo.
“Therefore, you must have a robust backup system in order to recover that data. Because if you don't, the question is not how long does it take to recover? It's can you actually recover?”
According to Weaver, about half of organizations are not confident in their ability to perform a recovery from their backups, which is concerning since backups remain key to recover from any adverse event – not just a cyberattack.
Why you need to deduplicate your data
“Data is growing in some organizations at an exponential rate,” said Weaver. “But we have to back up. We back up because we need to recover in the event of an outage, potentially, or for regulatory compliance. And it differs depending on industry. But anybody that has an infrastructure and environment has to back up their data.”
Weaver mentioned that Dell Data Domain appliances allow you to back up and deduplicate data. “Deduplication is important, because if you have an environment that, say, has 100 terabytes of front-end data, and you back that up, it’s a great big environment. And if you back it up for 30 days, you have 30 days times 100 terabytes. That's a whole lot of data. That's going to be three petabytes of data sitting in retention.”
However, if you deduplicate that data down, it allows you to store data on a much smaller footprint. And that’s where Dell comes in.
Backing up data to the cloud with Dell Data Domain
Weaver said the Dell appliances “can go from the very small to the very big, whether it's on-prem, it's in the cloud. We have virtual editions that we use in the public cloud. And I think today, we're protecting something in excess of 10 exabytes of data in the public cloud.
“We have customers on second, third, fourth generation of this technology because it works and it works well. The newer models have improved service-level objectives, higher ops, faster networking. But the bottom line is this technology continues to evolve with our customers in terms of adding things like increased security benefits.
“With the new models, we have something called hardware-assisted compression, which allows us to compact the data even higher than it was in the prior generations. So we're up 20 or 30 percent from an efficiency point of view.”
Custom deployments take the pain out of data management
Weaver acknowledged that most IT administrators would rather be adding value than babysitting their backups. Fortunately, Dell Data Domain can help.
“We can do things like custom deployments where we can deploy templates out if you're deploying multiple of these units. We can push configurations out very, very simply. It's an easy product to manage. It's an easy product to deploy. It very much is a set-it-and-forget-it type of technology.
“When it comes to backing up or managing the backup infrastructure, we can manage things through a single namespace. So we can literally take a bunch of data domain systems, aggregate them together as a single namespace, load balance that across multiple units, so that you're literally managing a single environment versus a whole bunch of discrete environments together, discrete devices together. And this is really to help address enterprise management complexity that happens at large scale with customers.”
Dell works equally well in the cloud or on-premises
“If you're a hybrid approach and you have some data on-prem and you have data in the cloud, we can take data on-prem, back it up on-prem,” said Weaver. “Cloud's great. But if you need to pull a lot of data from the cloud, it's going to take some time to bring 100 terabytes of data back, right? So we can do on-prem, replicate to the cloud or from cloud back to on-prem. It's efficient. It scales pretty easily. It's resilient. And we do a ton of data protection in the cloud, whether it's a deep archive or replication target or backing up primary workloads like IaaS workloads in the big three hyperscalers.”
Why you should consider backups as part of your cybersecurity strategy
“If you get hit by a cyberattack, are you 100 percent sure you can recover?” Weaver asked. “And then does your senior leadership knows that? Because it's one thing, if you're not 100 percent sure, but then you say to your CFO or CEO or CIO, 'I think we have some risk here. Here's the risk. I think we can remediate or correct that risk.' And then it's on them.
“But if you don't tell them 'I think we have risk,' then that's on you, right? Because at the end of the day, as IT professionals, it's important that you have a true read of the state of the nation, so to speak, from a backup and recovery point of view.”
Weaver added that “Not everyone wants to spend their time on backup. I get that. But it's important, right? Here's the best piece of advice I can give you. Regular updates and patching of your environment. If you're not regularly updating and patching your environment, there’s a security risk, full stop.”