The smarter side of data backup

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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.