Organizations are swiftly embracing hybrid/multi-cloud for better agility and faster innovation. Yet, the transition might involve some challenges, especially with regard to data management. Building a robust data management system thus becomes crucial as it allows organizations to seamlessly manage, protect, and access their data in a hybrid cloud environment for enhanced decision-making and business processes. An effective data management system should simplify the creation, operation, and archiving of applications. At times, even data protection becomes a roadblock rather than an asset to an organization, making the entire data life cycle more complex. Often, organizations create workarounds for manual workflows or create scripts to automate as much as possible. These enterprise data protection solutions, however, are manual workflows, and hence, not ideal.
A hybrid cloud environment provides several business benefits. Yet, as the amount of data grows, the environment becomes more complex, so data protection needs to evolve tremendously.
Challenges with legacy backup systems
We often hear from customers that their legacy data protection systems, some of which were purchased decades ago, are just not prepared for the future. They are complex, and have wound up with hundreds, if not thousands, of backup jobs to maintain over the years. Legacy systems can suffer from slow and inconsistent recovery, and they don’t leverage advancements in instant recovery.
The legacy backup systems being used over the years don’t cater to tomorrow’s business needs. It is expected to do more with less, but the backup tools require a lot of manual effort and monitoring. With data growth, the environment gets complex, and it is difficult to keep up with the requirement. These legacy tools have outdated architecture that results in slow and inconsistent recoveries over time and a significant slowdown in the enterprises’ ability to adjust, pivot, and stay competitive.
This forces enterprises to spend more by purchasing multiple backup products from multiple vendors for different workloads/use cases. This does not include the cost of hiring and training the resources. These purchases require frequent hardware refreshes and carry unpredictable costs in future years.
Also, because of the poor cloud integration of legacy backup systems, customers miss out on using low-cost cloud storage, intelligent cloud tiering, and public cloud data archival capabilities, resulting in organizations’ inability to take advantage of the elasticity and scalability of the cloud.
Additionally, the biggest problem enterprises face today is cyber-attacks in the form of ransomware attacks that have spared no industry or vertical. With legacy data protection tools in place (that are extremely vulnerable to such attacks because of their inherent architecture), the major issue here is the lengthy time to restore, which is complex, multi-step, and error-prone. Manual identification of the affected surface area can take days/weeks. Modern ransomware also includes data exfiltration attacks, threatening to publicly disclose your most sensitive information if you don’t agree to meet their demands.
There are three major imperatives for data as enterprises proceed through digital transformation
- Modernize and Automate: Building a modern architecture with constant innovation that saves time, improves operational efficiency, and reduces costs associated with data protection.
- Multi/Hybrid-Cloud: Providing a purpose-built platform for hybrid and multi-cloud environments to increase cloud mobility and improve business agility while taking advantage of the cloud’s economies of scale.
- Mitigate Data Risk: Enterprises want to get more from their data. They want to ensure that their data is compliant with regulations, and most of all, they want their data to be secure and fully protected from ransomware.
Considering these key tenets of modern data protection and maintaining the focus on a cloud-driven approach, HCLTech help enterprises transform their old data protection methodologies. This is facilitated by providing new-age data protection solutions as part of its HCLTech Infonomics offering.
HCLTech BackupNXT for next-gen backup solutions
HCLTech Infonomics is an integrated information lifecycle management approach that streamlines the information protection process, optimizes resource consumption, and drives cost, storage, and management economies. One of the key data management tenets it includes is BackupNXT. It is a next-generation backup to the cloud or on-premises framework for structured and unstructured data across heterogeneous storage platforms hosted in a data center, remote sites, or the cloud.
BackupNxt has a clearly defined solution design framework that encourages the best practices to achieve storage optimization, WAN optimization, security, and heterogeneous environment support.
It offers a framework that caters to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios irrespective of the workload and the current backup tool being used.
BackupNXT helps enterprises break away from the legacy backup approaches and spurs up the utilization of hyperscale cloud providers. It provides flexibility in agent-less backups, lightweight microservices-based app-consistent backups of various applications, and easy-to-consume universal licensing. It also brings optimization to the backup function, helps reduce the service-level agreements (SLAs), and includes the other discrete elements of the solution that are brought under the single umbrella of HCLTech’s managed services.
The wholesome backup service spans virtual machines (VMs), databases, file servers, applications in addition to new-age workloads, such as cloud SaaS applications (MS Exchange, OneDrive) and cloud PaaS (such as AWS RDS and Azure AKS). With its advanced features, the idea is to create a running backup and restoration function that is stitched according to the urgent needs of enterprises.
HCLTech BackupNXT powered by Rubrik
HCLTech BackupNXT engages with Rubrik, one of our reputed partners, covering the above-mentioned aspects. With Rubrik’s unique capabilities, BackupNXT delivers seamless integration with the cloud with automation and instant data access to enable data mobility, lifecycle management, and native backup and recovery across hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Rubrik simplifies data protection with policy-driven management, assures recoverability in the cloud, and unifies data management. Thus, customers can reduce the risk of downtime, optimize costs, achieve operational efficiency, and realize cloud modernization.
HCLTech BackupNXT powered by Rubrik is built to leverage the flexibility and economics of the public cloud from day one. It helps protect enterprise applications, search across applications and files, and quickly spin up test/dev instances in the cloud - through a single control plane. This helps customers save 30% to 50% in total hard costs, and they recover 70% to 90% of their operational time when they move on from their legacy system.
Figure 1 - HCLTech BackupNXT powered by Rubrik Framework
Rubrik also helps make it faster and easier to recover from a ransomware attack. Its uniquely immutable file system natively prevents unauthorized deletion of backups. They provide in-depth assessments of the damage, single-click restoration to the most recent clean state, and , alerts on unusual behavior using machine learning when an attack occurs.
HCLTech BackupNXT, powered by Rubrik, can implement automation, AI, machine learning, hyper-convergence, and other new technologies to ensure simplicity, security, and availability of your data. HCLTech partners with major cloud providers to seamlessly extend your data protection as you transition along your cloud journey. Our platform provides software flexibility and license portability that helps align with your cloud strategy no matter if, when, or how it changes, and uses its unique position to unlock intelligence from your backup data, turning it into a business asset. This further allows us to innovate and create new tools to meet the needs of global enterprises.
Conclusion
Enterprises should not see data protection as the end of the journey but rather consider it a step toward data management. The pandemic-induced uncertainties have accelerated cloud adoption among organizations to drive their cloud-centric business transformation, and with HCLTech and Rubrik, cloud data management transformation can be ensured by leveraging data effectively.
A real-life use case: The solution’s effectiveness was seen in a recent engagement with an American multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation. HCLTech and Rubrik jointly created a modern cloud data protection solution architecture for the client. As a result, the client obtained significantly improved SLAs, drastic savings on total cost of ownership (TCO), and 100% as-a-service operations globally through the solution.
Learn more about the HCLTech-Rubrik partnership here:
https://www.hcltech.com/about-us/alliances/rubrik
https://www.rubrik.com/en/partners/service-delivery-partners/hcl-technologies
