The smarter side of data backup

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: How much data have I backed up? Am I within my backup window? What is the state of my storage capacity? How much does it cost to protect my data?

For most large enterprises, answering these questions can be time consuming and difficult. Couple this with expanding data volumes, increasing compliance demands and evolving stake-holder requirements, and the task becomes even more challenging.

No wonder that the traditional manual backup checks and spreadsheet reporting approaches of yesterday’s enterprise simply cannot keep pace in today’s competitive, information-driven environments. Companies now must be able to align backup and recovery processes with their business needs.

The good news is that business-focused backup reporting applications that provide the right backup information to the right people at the right time are emerging. These applications offer the consistent, transparent, business reports needed to establish and document the contributions IT services make to business value.

Backup strategies may vary from one company to the next, but virtually every organisation faces a similar set of backup objectives and challenges. Regardless of company size or industry, organisations must be able to back up and restore growing quantities of data while meeting strict service level agreements (SLAs) as well as external regulations and requirements.

This is no easy feat since the backup needs of an extensive range of stakeholders—from IT management to C-level executives, database administrators, legal teams, and more—must also be addressed. Chances are these individuals must also be kept updated on backup operations and require specific information on backup data tailored to their individual needs and requirements.

However, internal and external compliance issues are only part of the challenge. Many backup administrators lack the tools to make backups more efficient and effective in meeting business-level goals. After all, managing backup data operations, particularly large environments, can be very complex, while critical backup processes such as reporting often consist of rudimentary manual practices that are not only cumbersome but also prone to human error.

Additionally, many organisations do not fully understand how much backup and recovery operations cost the business. Since backup operations are typically run as a silo, with little or no alignment with the overall needs of the business, it is nearly impossible to measure their impact on the business. Yet, the ability to align backup costs with business needs and effectively forecast and budget for critical hardware and software resources is essential in running an effective operation.

Enter business-focused backup reporting, allowing IT organisations to align their operations with overall business goals. These reporting applications can be used by IT managers and specialists, as well as CIOs, application owners, finance, legal teams, line-of-business managers, capacity planning teams, external customers and compliance auditors. Because business-focused backup reporting supports information tailored to the requirements of the recipient, these applications represent a complementary counterpart to the real-time operational monitoring and management tools used by IT administrators for alerting, troubleshooting and management of day-to-day backup operations.

For many IT administrators, the words “efficiency” and “backup” have been mutually exclusive. After all, backups were a hit-and-miss, tedious, resource-intensive task whose success or failure was largely a mystery until the dreaded moment when actually having to recover the information or system from a disaster or outage.

Today’s backup and recovery solutions now offer disk-based technologies, continuous data protection, quick bare metal restore and granular recovery of critical applications as well as management and monitoring tools to reduce backup administration time and effort.

But perhaps the application that has been most effective at bringing together efficiency and backup is business-focused reporting. With this application, organisations have a centralised reporting view of single or multiple backup applications and can monitor resource utilisation and identify constraints. They can also identify growth trends and plan backup resources, proactively distribute reports to key stakeholders, define success rates based on the intended audience and automate manual processes.

These reporting applications help answer business-related queries about backup operations because they can analyse data over time and therefore provide a means to do predictive forecasting of critical resources such as how many tapes, tape media or disk resources should be purchased, and when.

As cost analysis and chargeback make the operation more transparent, it also puts the spotlight on how effective and efficiently resources are being managed. The cost of disks, tapes, drives, and libraries is a significant component of data protection total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, does it make sense to buy new drives when overall utilisation is 40%? Why purchase more tapes when supply exceeds demand by a factor of five? Understanding how and when resources are used and then scheduling additional backup jobs to fill idle time also saves money.

Additionally, wouldn’t it be nice to know what tapes are offsite so that IT can replenish the stock in the tape libraries when they expire? The ability to forecast, perform “what if” and leverage supply and demand reports will ensure that sound inventory management practices are applied.

IT departments must provide accurate, auditable reports that measure backup performance against internal service-level agreements and verify requirements from continuous improvement frameworks.

Yet, meeting recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements is easier said than done, and proving it is even more difficult. The same is true for complying with—as well as validating compliance with—such external regulations as Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), California Senate Bill 1386, and much more.

Business-focused reporting addresses the three common measures for compliance reporting and data protection: RPO, success rate, and verification. Reports can be used to measure a service level and understand RPO exposure by application such as Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. These same reports can be automatically emailed to key stakeholders such as database administrators or CXO’s. Other reports can be used to quickly compare critical application success rates so that improvements can be made in environments that are falling short and not meeting established service level agreements.

These and additional reports can also be used to prove to auditors that IT is executing on its stated backup strategy and actively addressing compliance issues.

Most organisations would agree that backup and other IT processes should be run as a business. But defining just what that means may vary from one business to the next.

Nevertheless, virtually every organisation is likely to point to cost savings as an indication of a backup operation that is conducted as a business. Running backup operations in this manner promotes cost savings by enabling the proactive management of IT operations with the business, providing a mechanism to achieve cost analysis and chargeback to business units or customers, and, in some cases, delivering a model for managed service providers.

To that end, business-focused reporting makes it easy for IT to view data in the context of the business and a specific audience, whether by geography, application, operating system, data centre, customer, business unit, service tier, and more. In fact, reports can be generated that tabulate backup costs by line of business, thereby aligning data protection with the organisation and even providing a means to influence consumer behaviour.

Clearly, today’s advanced backup reporting applications are a solution to some of IT’s most proximate and pressing challenges. With these applications, organisations can improve the efficiency of their backup and recovery operations while proving compliance with internal and external requirements and transforming backup from being viewed as a cost centre to demonstrating its vital role in meeting business-level goals.