With the threat of cybercrime continuing to increase and the risk of data corruption at any time, it’s essential to have reliable data protection. The cloud is a terrific repository for backups – easy, quick and able to scale upon demand. Agency IT departments need a single, flexible, easily managed hybrid solution to protect sensitive data and all other assets.
The public cloud is a collection of computing services, from software to platforms to entire infrastructures, created and hosted by third-party providers. Those services are available to anyone over the internet, typically on a subscription basis.
For even greater flexibility, you can spread workloads and storage across multiple clouds — in what is known as a multi-cloud environment. This model helps to ensure availability and keeps services close to end users for the best performance. The public cloud model is appealing to many agencies, mainly due to its simplicity, agility and low startup costs. And you can choose to use whatever backup software you want.
Agencies clearly recognize the value of the cloud. Keeping in line with the Cloud First and Cloud Smart policies, many workloads have already been migrated to the cloud. Even so, agency leaders continue to invest in their on-premises environments. Why? Security, control and proximity, to name a few reasons.
Right or wrong, the public cloud is often seen as less secure than an in-house environment, or at least more conducive to meeting complex regulatory requirements. And the notion of relying on a third party’s services rather than controlling those services on-premises leaves some IT managers with concerns. Plus, your data center is in your backyard — that is, your data, applications, containers and all services are close by, enabling you to support critical workloads and keep latency issues to a minimum.
But protecting on-premises assets can be expensive, both in terms of capital costs for equipment and software, and operating expenses for maintenance and IT effort. Agencies spend a lot of money on backup and recovery solutions, which are sometimes redundant. They also maintain disaster recovery sites, which often include a full replica of servers, backup and other systems that take over in the event that a data center goes down.
There is another option, which provides some of the best features of on-prem and public cloud environments.
With a hybrid backup solution, agencies can deliver as‐a‐service backup and recovery to both data center and edge locations. The edge, by the way, is the point where an agency’s enterprise network connects to a third-party network. With this approach, you get comprehensive backup and recovery, completely protecting assets within the infrastructure, and compute resources for protecting assets at scale for cloud-based environments.
The hybrid solution is flexible, letting you decide the right mix of backing up to the cloud, backing up in the cloud, keeping backups in the cloud over the long term and leveraging the cloud for reliable disaster recovery. It works well for multi-cloud environments too, where tracking and backing up assets can be a challenge.
Agencies can also realize greater cost efficiencies with a hybrid solution. According to a study by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a cloud-based data protection solution that efficiently stores data can result in a 47% reduction in total monthly costs.
In summary, a hybrid data protection solution scales easily, simplifies management and cuts costs.
This blog is an excerpt from GovLoop Academy’s recent course, “Controlling Data Protection Costs in the Cloud,” created in partnership with Dell. Access the full course here.
