Safety, Compliance & Peace of Mind

• Why do I need the headache and cost of keeping copies off-site?

  Whether bound by regulations or good business practices, all enterprises must store copies of their critical data away from their data centers to protect this information from natural disasters and accidental or malicious modification. However, long-term retention demands complex and difficult to manage technology refreshes and data migrations. Moreover, an effective retention policy today must meet stringent demands.

  The offsite storage repository has to be highly secure, continually monitored, and, of course, cost-effective. It has to be forever scalable as the volume of data generated grows inexorably and regulatory guidelines impose longer retention periods. Data also must be available constantly and easily to satisfy business and recovery needs. Finally, files must be quickly searchable and accessible to verify and fulfill regulatory compliance. Enterprises can meet these requirements using internal resources, which typically strain budgets and IT staffs, or by turning to simpler, more economical solutions offered by storage service providers.

• Why not continue to rely on backup tapes?

  For decades, tape media has been the traditional data retention strategy for most enterprises. Although tape locks away large volumes of data, it is a generations-old technology that no longer meet business needs in the age of high-speed data networking and regulatory compliance.

  First, tape is burdensome. The media requires IT staff to manually and routinely make backups and ship the tape offsite. Moreover, enterprises suffer from vendor lock-in because they must use the same hardware and software environment five years from now to read tapes made today. Therefore, while tape may initially seem practical and cost-effective, it generates many expenses that elevate its long-term cost of ownership.

  Second, accessing data from tape is cumbersome. Retrieving data demands poring over indexes of tape contents, obtaining the appropriate tapes, and carefully rebuilding the files on production networks. This laborious process consumes IT resources and delays access to business-critical information.

  Therefore, and this is a deal-breaker, tape is woefully inadequate in today's regulatory environment. Administrators must verify that vital data are stored and quickly locate and retrieve specific information should a compliance issue arise. Yet tape indexes are limited and provide no full-text search capability. Consequently, tape suffers in comparison to modern alternatives like the Nirvanix cloud storage service.

• Is your data really secure on tape?

  If used properly, tape media can effectively warehouse data offsite, but this is a mission-critical "if." The process of writing, handling, shipping, and retrieving tapes is notoriously error-prone. There are few error-checking procedures to confirm that all data have been properly stored. In fact, many high-profile data-loss incidents were due to the improper handling of tapes. These limitations undermine the security of a long-term tape backup strategy, particularly since superior alternatives are now available. Advanced solutions from Nirvanix encrypt data both in flight and at rest and enable you to instantly verify the integrity of your files.

• Is in-house data replication a good alternative to tape?

  For years, enterprises have replicated their data to disk at offsite locations for the rapid recovery of operations in the event of a disaster. Yet, merely retaining a single active mirror of a data set leaves much to be desired when it comes to meeting backup and compliance demands. Long-term retention requires multiple point-in-time copies, permitting a rollback of data to a previous state. Additionally, compliance archives must be immutable if they are to show the state of a system at a certain point in the past. Therefore, while replication and mirroring are excellent choices for disaster recovery, they do not meet all today's data protection needs.

  Moreover, in-house replication is expensive and complex. It requires building, staffing, configuring, and operating a remote data center, which is very costly. It also entails installing over-provisioned hardware to ensure future capacity, driving up capital outlays still further. The fact is the costs and complexity of maintaining long-term, compliance-ready storage repositories are only going to worsen. Addressing compliance and business demands with in-house backup is becoming too expensive and burdensome for all but the most highly capitalized enterprises.

• Business Need:
• Backup and Archiving Software
• Offsite Data Protection
• Tier N Storage
• Distributed Content & Collaboration
• Embedded Storage
• VMware Environments
• Industry:
• Media & Entertainment
• Financial Services
• Life Sciences
• Service Providers
• Healthcare