Member Article

Say Goodbye to legacy: Moving over to cloud-native availability solutions

In today’s fast-growing digital world, services not only have to be accessible 24/7, but also have to meet strict SLAs. Achieving this is contingent on critical data being available and recoverable at all times to ensure business continuity. But common data threats and vulnerabilities might get in the way unless there’s an effective data protection solution in place. The good news is that backup technologies and data protection have come a long way, and businesses can now be more resilient than ever.

More than a decade ago, in the era of real-server environments, legacy backup solutions were popular among organisations and they were widely used for data protection. But with the recent advances in data protection technologies, these solutions leave much to be desired. They remain disruptive, agent-based, time-consuming and resource-intensive tools, which were not designed for the cloud. Failing to adapt to today’s highly virtualised world and to live up to the expectations of modern organizations has meant that legacy backup solutions have lagged behind.

The rapid expansion of cloud computing has undoubtedly brought along considerable benefits when it comes to data protection. It has made backing up business data cheaper, simpler and more flexible, and, to top that off, it is highly scalable. This market is dominated by cloud vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. However, even these new solutions are, to an extent, caught in the trap of backing up legacy systems for customers operating in hybrid environments.

In addition, how safe is data really in the cloud? Businesses assume that data redundancy is a fail-safe method in case of unforeseen events. However, any errors, unintentional or malicious, are simply replicated across a business’s systems. With cloud solutions, there is no possibility of restoring workloads from a specific point in time. Moreover, according to a recent report by McAfee, a large number of organisations that have chosen to store their sensitive data in public cloud environments are at higher risk of losing control of their data and this is “driving new areas of risk”.

Yet, this digital transformation need not be a stumbling block for businesses. An all-in-one backup solution with cloud-native capabilities can be just the data protection solution that meets the challenges in virtualised and cloud environments.

Retiring legacy systems

Many organisations have already realised that they are wasting their server resources on outdated systems. Fast-growing virtualisation technologies offer a more viable and effective alternative and this has led to a rush to invest in cloud technologies and virtualisation. In the process, many legacy backup systems that were once used on physical machines were simply moved over to virtual ones. And there’s the rub.

Legacy solutions are scrambling to meet the needs of organisations in today’s fast-moving and virtualised environments. They are slow with new releases, cumbersome to update and manage, and do not offer the features of cloud-native backup solutions. Moreover, the cloud alone cannot futureproof organisations and cover their backup and recovery needs. Essentially, using legacy systems in your company’s production environment prevents you from operating your backup infrastructure effectively and efficiently. Luckily, there is an alternative solution to safeguarding your data.

The future is cloud-native

If organisations want an effective and efficient backup solution for reliable data recovery and restoration in any scenario, the only way to go is a modern, feature-rich, and robust cloud-native backup solution. While no solution is foolproof, a cloud-native backup solution comes pretty close. Native backup outperforms legacy backup solutions in several key areas:

• Agentless Cloud-native backup architecture does not require installing agents within the operating system - solutions integrate seamlessly with the virtual infrastructure and interact with it without the need for additional software.

• Scalable Without as many elements, native backup solutions have almost no limitation to fast scaling both horizontally and vertically to meet evolving backup needs. In contrast to legacy backup solutions, they are less complex and do not need weeks to deploy.

• Image-based Cloud-native backup solutions are image-based - they create a copy of the operating system with all its data which are then saved as a single file which contains everything needed to recreate the virtual machine in the event that something catastrophic happens.

• Replication With many legacy backup products, a backup is all you get. If organisations wish to perform data replication, they either have to provide their own replication solution or pay extra for additional licensing to unlock replication features. An agile native backup offering, on the other hand, allows organisations to replicate any data and store it in multiple locations to ensure it can be retrieved if system failure occurs.

Legacy backup solutions hardly cover an organisation’s virtual environment backup and recovery needs, and combining them with cloud technologies only makes the backup and disaster recovery process more complex and time-consuming. As virtualisation is evolving, organisations cannot afford to ignore the necessity of backing up their virtual data using an integrated automated cloud-backup solution. Regardless of setup, organisations must realise that legacy backup solutions are of no help and are a thing of the past.

By Veniamin Simonov, Director of Product Management at Nakivo. For more information, visit www.nakivo.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nakivo .