Data Protection & the Unmanned Office

Hassle-free Business Continuity whatever lockdown

You are responsible for managing the backup systems and IT infrastructure for your company, and the Coronavirus has brought chaos to your community. Whether a lockdown is declared, or your company institutes a work-from-home policy, the result is that hardly anyone is in the office.

How to safeguard your data when there’s almost no one in the office?

An unmanned office presents some unique risks to your I.T. infrastructure, your backups included. Here are some ways you can prepare for an office lockdown, so your data remains secure while the office is almost empty. This will also impact the people working from 3^rd party companies that intervene either as managed services or providing onsite intervention in case of Hardware failure. Meanwhile your IT system and services are all the more instrumental in ensuring the continuity of business and supporting remote workers and their valuable data.

What to do to prepare, so business and data remain secure and burden free?

The unique circumstances of the current lockdowns present challenges to data protection regardless of the size of your company

Small environments:

can run out of disk space with no one to manipulate the data cartridges and store them safely
in case of a restore, having no one on site to manipulate the physical media can be problematic
in case of a hardware failure, it is difficult to organize a break and fix operation or swap spares.

NEC answers, HYDRAstor helps: HYDRAstor Virtual Appliance will provide a cost effective disk-based solution, possibly running on your existing Virtualized environments, and can scale logically from 1 to 96 Tb.

Larger environments:

can run out of disk space with no one to manipulate the data cartridges and store them safely
in case of a hardware failure, it is difficult to organize a break and fix operation or swap spares. This is even more challenging when the failure occurs in the controllers of your Scale Up solution.
Adding more capacity or more performance to your backup Scale up target environment - without cumbersome manual intervention- is highly complex

Your employees may not be able to go to your Data Center as to do maintenance and add capacity when necessary. Even if your IT infrastructure is safe in your Data Center, because of COVID-19, your employees are not able to access the DC and take care of your equipment for an either planned or un-planned downtime.

NEC answers, HYDRAstor helps: NEC HYDRAstor HS8-50s is a scale out Backup and Archive Grid architecture which will provide, due to innovative and field proven Enterprise Grade technology:

100% Data Resilience, managing multiple failures within a Single Grid (*)
non-forklift upgrade, without production stop, by adding a node that is automatically detected
simple and easy license scheme which is not capacity based

Your goals and requirements for good Data Protection

The overarching goal in Data Protection is to recover your systems in the case of an event.

You can then break down that overall goal into smaller bite-sized goals:

Goal 1: To have a valid backup to recover from, and to make sure that backup is secure

Goal 2: To lose as little data as possible. (RPO)

Goal 3: To recover in the fastest time possible. (RTO)

All these three points make perfect sense. Achieving these goals within the constraints of a lockdown is possible when you’re using NEC HYDRAstor backup storage solution, because:

HYDRAstor offer you a fully redundant storage grid, which allows 100% higher protection level than traditional backup solutions. It provides recovery from a failure up to 50X faster than other backup solutions using RAID technology. (Addressing goal #1, #2 & #3)
HYDRAstor offers you functions such as Enterprise WORM and In-flight and At-rest Encryption, natively. These features allow you to keep and replicate your backups securely and manage your data in a well-governed fashion. (Addressing goal #1
HYDRAstor reduces management costs for backup by up to 70%, using smarter “house keeping protocols” and by up to 90% fewer manual intervention when expanding/reducing the grid. This will help you utilize your resources more efficiently.
Last but not least, HYDRAstor is a backup target (hardware), which works perfectly with all backup software’s on the market. This allows you to make use of the best of breed solutions on the market and prevent any type of vendor lock-in.

Leave the Office with Peace of Mind

So leave the office with full peace of mind. You can rely on HYDRAstor to protect your data and ensure continuity, while you and your organization can concentrate on keeping your business running. HYDRAstor helps. Check it out!

(*) for a minimum of 3 nodes.