In today's security landscape, preventing data loss and lowering the severity of incidents like cyberattacks are critical. You should look for a solution that can protect your digital assets while ensuring that there is no downtime.
Many of today's siloed backup and disaster recovery systems have substantial gaps in protection, leaving most MSPs to choose between sacrificing functionality or paying higher costs and relying on patching together separate components to make up for the lack of completeness.
Because it affects all corporate data and the bulk of an organization's applications, a backup solution should be kept in a strategic location. Backup solution providers are expanding their reach beyond backup and recovery now that they have access to your clients' lifeblood. More and more, choosing the appropriate solution is about more than simply simple backup. Many suppliers are introducing new and innovative technologies like as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics to help technicians be more efficient and productive.
Before deciding on a backup solution provider, it's critical to understand the wide range of options available, what to look for, and where potential coverage gaps exist in order to put your company in the best position to avoid data loss and downtime.
Protecting your evolving data center
Client data is stored on traditional infrastructure, in clouds and SaaS apps, and on remote endpoints, making IT infrastructures increasingly complex. It can be difficult to balance a variety of technology, but preserving them doesn't have to be. With a streamlined, all-in-one approach to backup, recovery automation, and cloud continuity, you need the flexibility to secure all workloads. It should be developed to interact with a variety of computing styles so that technicians may be more productive and get more done in less time. Today's best data protection solutions are pre-integrated and tuned to enable high-speed, effortless performance across a wide range of infrastructures.
Purpose-built appliances
You'd have to combine dozens of distinct hardware and software components if you built your own backup and recovery solution, including servers, storage, deduplication, networking, OS, virtualization, security, analytics, search, monitoring, and testing.
The importance of a modern, straightforward user experience cannot be overstated. That is to say, the solution should be provided in such a way that it is simple to administer and operate without the need for an administrative guide. This is accomplished by leveraging a single, central dashboard that allows you to manage protection across a wide range of digital assets while also allowing you to customize backup strategies for each covered task.
Protection for all workloads
On-premises systems, cloud-based systems (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), and remote endpoints are all common computing paradigms in business environments. From a single pane of glass, your backup and recovery solution should be able to protect hundreds of versions of operating systems, hypervisors, apps, and cloud-native formats.
Local disasters – Utilize an appliance
Today's backup appliances come with comprehensive computer platforms, including powerful processors, massive storage capacities, backup software, and remote management capabilities. These devices are your first line of defense in the event of a disaster. If a server, virtual host, or data center rack goes down, you can use your most recent backup data to spin up and execute any unsuccessful applications straight on the appliance. The appliance could also help with virtual environment recovery by functioning as a temporary data store throughout the recovery process. In order to spin up virtual machines (VMs) significantly faster than recreating the backup chain on the VM's connected storage, the backup data is injected into a share mounted to the appliance.
Site-level disasters – Support for multiple locations
Our personnel can be on-site for every client at any time, and our backup and recovery solutions may be handled remotely. You should be able to handle all protected sites from a single console if you utilize a single appliance. Appliances at different places can act as replication targets for other appliances, preventing a client from being brought down by a site-level calamity like an electricity outage or a flood. If a company does not have numerous locations or the resources to support co-location, cloud-based DRaaS providers can quickly spin up mission-critical applications and divert user traffic to hosted workloads, reducing the impact of a site-wide outage.
AI-based ransomware detection
For attackers, data is growing more valuable, and ransomware remains the most common cyber threat today. Modern variations are designed to get through security and backup protections by conducting phased attacks that target backups in a variety of ways. These are usually accomplished by incorporating periods of gestation and dormancy prior to the payload's detonation. Early detection allows for a quicker recovery. Change rate prediction, data entropy, variance in compression and deduplication rates, and data generation randomness are some of the indicators that may be measured and examined to detect an active ransomware infection in near real-time. When an infection is discovered, our professionals are automatically notified, and any possibly infected files are flagged to avoid their use in the recovery process.
Keeping cloud DR from becoming its own disaster
The cloud is rapidly being used as a disaster recovery site by businesses of all sizes. Backups are replicated and securely stored in the cloud at a reasonable cost, where they are protected from accidental deletion or ransomware assaults. Backup files stored in the cloud should serve two purposes: first, they should be retained to meet data compliance requirements, and second, they should be easily accessible for disaster recovery.
SaaS – Protect and recover data for applications running in the cloud
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce are among the cloud-based productivity applications that are increasingly being used by businesses. These Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers follow a shared-responsibility approach. It means that the organization subscribing to the service is responsible for the users, data, and applications, while the service provider is responsible for the infrastructure's resiliency and availability.
While SaaS systems provide rudimentary recovery capabilities, they are unsuitable for today's backup and recovery needs since they have substantial constraints on what can be recovered, where it can be recovered, and how long the data can be recovered. If not recovered in time, erased emails, files, folders, and contacts are permanently deleted and unrecoverable even by the service provider.
Complete backup and recovery for SaaS apps, including admin and end-user self-service recovery, is now possible with tools. Use a cloud-to-cloud backup solution for cloud-based applications to relieve your team of the stress of managing backup and storage infrastructure on-premises. Unlike a system that saves SaaS data locally, a cloud-based backup and recovery solution like ours helps reduce costs and time to recovery without using your networking resources for data transfer.
Endpoint backup and recovery - Remote employee protection
End users are increasingly creating crucial data and IP on the edge in hybrid environments, storing it on devices that aren't always connected to corporate networks for backup and recovery by local solutions. Endpoint backup solutions replicate data from endpoints to data centers, whether they're Android and iOS phones/tablets, Windows and Mac desktops/laptops, or even Windows servers. The value of an endpoint backup solution, on the other hand, is determined by how well it restores data following a data loss incident caused by deliberate or inadvertent deletion, ransomware, or other cyber threats.
Predictive hardware analytics
Proactive monitoring should be in place by solution providers to predict hardware and software failures. Predictive analysis technology allows a provider's support team to determine what is inside the normal performance range for each component. Slight performance irregularities can be detected remotely and used to predict future concerns, such as a hard drive failure. They should be monitoring and resolving problems before they affect backup operations.
Customer support – 24/7/365
Disasters don't give you advance notice, and they don't strike between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. You need a backup and recovery system that is backed by a team of skilled engineers who are available through phone, chat, and email 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like ours at RCS. To guarantee simple access and prompt resolutions for more advanced queries and issues, support engineers should be placed in the same location as product development and qualified control engineers. Inquire about our recorded satisfaction ratings to learn how previous customers regarded our customer service.
For more information on optimizing your IT and securing your network, contact RCS Professional Services to speak with an IT professional or visit our website www.rcsprofessional.com.
