Protecting Data is about the Right Timing

One of the biggest challenges facing the IT teams today is to have a secure backup fordata and this is further complicated by the virtual layers present everywhere. Dell’s solutions ensure the data is graded on critically and hence storage is optimized. There is no data loss while at the same time it is secure. These solutions are being sold in India by mature, well established and skilled partners, says Kumar Mitra – General Manager -Data Protection, APJ, – Dell Software.

What are the challenges that Indian enterprises face in managing and protecting enterprise data?

I think there are four different challenges that enterprises are facing today.

One is the explosive growth of data. The second is to do with the expectation from the business side, which has changed significantly over the last ten years. They now expect data to be available online 24 hours, and be accessible anywhere.

The third is to do with the infrastructure. Earlier it used to be physical (hardware) – servers, storage, etc., all house in a brick and mortar data center. But today it is a mix of physical and ‘virtual hardware’. While virtualization is great for technology, it also brings in new challenges for the IT teams and CIOs to manage. The fourth challenge is the whole paradigm of cloud. How and where would you want to use cloud to make your infrastructure efficient?

To elaborate on the first of these challenges – explosive growth of data – there is no backup window today. In the earlier days, at the end of a working day, say, 6.00 p.m., IT teams would save the day’s MIS reports and take a backup of the day’s work. Today however, not only has the data grown significantly, making incremental backup heavier, but systems are required to be up 24/7. Therefore, the traditional concept of ‘backup window’ no longer exists. IT teams have to figure out how they can manage backup and recovery in the light of how businesses today function.

Adding to the backup woes is the presence of virtual layers. Unlike backing up files in purely physical storage environments, in a virtual one you need to backup images or snapshots. This means the time taken for backup is higher, and so is the time to recover – since you cannot recover a single file, but a much larger image of a system.

The presence of a cloud environment adds to the complexity of DR plans. What percentage of data resides on the cloud? Who manages this cloud environment? Where does the backup of that data reside, and who manages that backup? These are some of the major challenges in managing data that enterprises today are facing.

How does Dell approach protecting enterprise data?

Our solutions and strategy are geared towards three objectives:

Easing the process in backing up and restoring data, making it automated, self-managed / easy to manage.
Reducing the amount of compromise enterprises have to make between uptime and cost of DR.
Educating customers on the types of DR and making them aware that not all approaches are guaranteed to provide 100% uptime.

Dell’s solutions allow customer to discern between data of varying criticality. Since some data is mission critical, it has to have a lower Recovery Time Objective (RTO) than other data which might not be as critical. Dell has different solutions that align to different RTOs.

Are Indian businesses aware of the criticality of protecting their data, versus their counterparts in the more mature markets?

Indian companies do understand that data is the new currency for business, and if they lose data, their business is at serious risk. Where perhaps there is a gap is in having the right solutions for different data sets that need to be protected. Another area of concern is the gap between current SLAs for data recovery and the respective business goals.

Customers tend to look at a single solution for protecting their entire data, and this approach may not be optimal. Dell’s position has been that different data sets need to be protected by best of breed solutions catered to the SLAs that the business users have.

From a sensitivity (to the pitfalls of not having robust backup / DR) or awareness perspective, Indian customers are on par with global businesses.

What is Dell’s channel strategy for DR and backup solutions?

We have a traditional channel model in which we have a go-to-market with system integrators who provide data center services to (their) customers. This model still continues, wherein we work with a lot a regional system integrators who in turn service customers of all sizes – enterprise, mid-market and even small businesses.

Now we have started working with global system integrators, the likes of Wipro or TCS, who are doing global deployments. We are talking to them for them to include Dell’s solutions as part of their backup/recovery/DR strategy.

Disaster recovery as a service by cloud providers has been around for some time now – Amazon, Rackspace, or even Indian players life Sify, Netmagic, etc., have been talking about this. As a market, however, this service is still rather small. The as-a-service adoption is still a small percentage of the overall backup and recovery market. We believe that over the next three years, this will become a significant market. Customers will move their (primary) backup to the cloud or at least, the ‘backup of the backup’ to the cloud. We believe that MSPs and cloud providers will be a big channel ecosystem for us. A lot of the product refresh that Dell will bring out will be aligned better towards the needs of these MSPs and cloud providers.

How is the channel maturity in India, specifically amongst those who deal with DR solutions and products?

The partners are very mature indeed, and are aligned to (global) industry best practices and business needs of their customers. Partner maturity is one part of the equation to an efficient and robust DR, and the other is customer maturity. Fortunately, the maturity exists on both sides. Even government customers are no longer talking only basic infrastructure, but too are also looking at building state of the art data center infrastructure.