Cobalt Iron’s Greg Tevis, an expert in IBM workloads, recently spoke with Meera Rangarajan, IBM program director and worldwide Power-as-a-Service product manager, and Joe Cropper, an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for all Power-as-a-Service offerings. Among other things, they discussed the role backup plays in business continuity and disaster recovery. To hear the whole conversation, click here.
In IT today, one of the topics on nearly everyone’s mind is how to construct a comprehensive business continuity strategy, especially in the world of enterprise cloud. As we all know, your business can’t continue without your data, so effective data backups are the foundation of business continuity and disaster recovery.
According to Meera Rangarajan, IBM program director and worldwide IBM Power-as-a-Service product manager, business continuity is one of the main reasons many enterprises choose IBM Power Virtual Server (VS), and their desire for simplicity and automation cannot be overstated.
In addition to all the things IBM has done with its own storage technology to make DR setup and operation simpler and more automated, it has partnered with Cobalt Iron to extend those qualities to the backup environment, where DR and business continuity begin.
Why Simplicity and Automation Are So Important
Surprisingly, effective backup operations are not as common as you might think, especially in the cloud environment, where backup strategy often takes a back seat to the day-to-day commotion of running a business. Some organizations might even assume that data security is the cloud provider’s responsibility. (Hint: It’s not.)
The complexities and exposures involved in backup — the amount of data; the many locations; the number of products, services, and applications and the interconnections between them; the ever-changing cyber threat landscape — can be overwhelming, even for the best staffed organizations.
Security of the backup environment is another big concern. Cyber criminals have gotten wise to the fact that backup is the key to the kingdom, so to speak, so they’re making a concerted effort to go after backup in order to extract ransoms and inflict maximum damage.
In the midst of all this, “there is zero tolerance for downtime,” Rangarajan says. “Outages of even a few minutes can negatively impact reliability and security and create serious compliance issues. The right disaster recovery strategy is hence very, very important for our clients.”
And so businesses need help protecting their backup data easily and consistently so they know they can recover and keep going if anything happens.
Compass and IBM
That’s where Cobalt Iron Compass comes in.
Compass brings new levels of business resiliency and cyber protection to Power VS workloads. It’s all thanks to Compass automation, which simplifies and secures data protection. Compass combines the compute, the storage, the backup, the database analytics, and other best-of-breed technologies into an automated backup experience.
Compass is getting a lot of attention for its ability to help companies transform business continuity practices and take backup operations from barely surviving to thriving. That’s because Compass has many qualities that are unique in the backup market:
Simplicity — Compass manages and maintains the entire backup infrastructure using automation and analytics through a cloud-based service, administered through the Compass Commander dashboard experience. That simplicity gets delivered through a hands-free SaaS model, either across clouds or even on-premises, in hermetically sealed appliances. Customers have told us that 80% to 90% of the complexity of managing backup operations (managing storage, maintaining health of devices and operations, security performance, patch maintenance, etc.) simply disappeared with Compass.
Zero Access® Security — Unlike the zero-trust security method, which grants access to a resource after verifying credentials, Compass introduces a new security model that takes access to backup out of the equation. It’s called Zero Access, and it eliminates the need for anyone to have operational access into the backup environment. The logins simply don’t exist. Instead, Compass automation and intelligence manage the backup server, compute, OS, database, storage and all the other backup components for you. And with that, it reduces the skill and the amount of resources required to manage your backup environment.
As a result, the Zero Access security model removes typical ransomware and other cyber attack vulnerabilities. It also limits any footholds for distributed denial-of-service attacks into the backup landscape because there are no entry points to flood with requests.
A key difference in the Compass solution is that these security features are built in to the architecture, not an add-on. They come with every deployment. Whether you’ve got 1 terabyte or hundreds of petabytes, you get the same level of security and service.
Data Governance — Data custodians increasingly need to understand and monitor how data is managed and be able to prove it to their business. Compass is unique among backup offerings in the level of data discipline it provides throughout the backup data life cycle. Data governance like this means you’re always recovery- and audit-ready — an important aspect of the overall disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.
IBM Integration — Another unique thing about Compass is that it is deeply integrated within the IBM cloud and is available directly from the IBM Cloud catalog.
Compass is the easiest and most secure way to protect your data. It’s really the easy button for enterprise-proven backup of Power VS and other cloud and even on-prem workloads.
IBM is offering a free 30-day trial of Compass from the IBM Cloud catalog. Contact Cobalt Iron or your IBM seller for more details.
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