Most organizations have more than one backup application, in fact most have three to four and are finding the number of backup applications they need to protect the organizations assets is increasing. At the same time industry and governmental requirements to confirm that data is being protected and retained are becoming more stringent. Organizations need verification that service level agreements are being met, not only for themselves but also to prove compliance with government mandates like GDPR and CCPA.
Most data protection applications are improving their reporting functionalities, some more so than others. The problem is that the concept of a single data protection solution to protect all applications and data is a concept past its prime. The modern organization is simply adopting environments faster than data protection vendors can add support for them. Today organizations have applications in the cloud, on-premises bare metal and on-premises virtualized. Each of these environments has a different market leading application, and who the market leader is changes every few years. A mixed data protection environment is a reality that customers need to accept and prepare a strategy for.
Organizations need a single source of truth when it comes to data protection, especially in the multi-vendor environment in which they now live. While each application provides some level of reporting, organizations need a single application that will report the SLA attainment for the enterprise, not individual backup sets.
Re-Introducing Bocada
For over a decade Bocada Software has focused on one thing, providing multi-vendor backup reporting. Their application is a complete backup reporting platform that collects data from over 15 different on-premises and cloud-based backup applications. The solution agentlessly aggregates and normalizes metadata from these backup solutions and compiles the data into ready-to-use reports. It also stores the metadata so that future reports can compare to prior reports to spot abnormal application behavior.
IT professionals need to know the protection status of each site, not how each backup application is running individually. Bocada’s centralized console enables IT administrators to report on backup performance and success/failure rates covering any period, any geography, server group or backup product in a matter of minutes.
The solution also provides systems and storage oversight. Organizations can optimize their data protection spend by leveraging built-in, automated reporting on storage trends and capacity usage to eliminate last minute fire drills because there is no more backup storage capacity available.
StorageSwiss Take
The days of organizations consolidating data protection to a single solution are long gone. Multiple applications for specific use cases are likely the reality going forward. The challenge is IT doesn’t have the time to manually inspect each data protection process across multiple sites. Bocada provides a centralized view of all data protection products and protected sites. Its dashboard alerts administrators to where the problem spots are and provides them with details they need to resolve those issues.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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