Page 92 - Cyber Warnings

Best Practices for Remote and Branch Office Data Protection

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software

We've all heard about fantastic new data centre technologies, but all too often it looks like these
technologies only seem to apply to the largest organizations with a wealth of centralized
resources. Because data doesn't just live in the data centre, we often face daily challenges
when data is put to use in the field at remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs).

Business and IT leaders need to recognize the unique needs of ROBOs. For instance, teams
based in remote offices need constant, reliable and fast access to essential data, without
sacrificing data security and integrity.

A challenge for IT leaders is how to ensure that data is available, even without a dedicated local
IT team to govern and control it. The 2016 Veeam Availability Report showed that half of the
respondents only test backups on a monthly basis, or even less frequently.

Long gaps between testing increase the chance of issues being found when data needs to be
recovered – at which point it may be too late for these organizations. And out of those who do
perform such tests, just 26 percent test more than five percent of their backups. This means that
the vast majority of backups are not verified and could fail. The percentage is even higher when
it comes to ROBO locations.

The good news for ROBOs is that it's now easier than ever — with the help of the right solutions
— to extend data centre backup, replication and Availability capabilities all the way out to the
edges of an entire organization.

So, how can ROBOs achieve excellent levels of Availability without facing complexity?

The Modern Data Centre Extends to ROBOs
The modern data centre has three key attributes – it is highly virtualized, it uses modern storage
solutions and has a cloud strategy in place.

Each of these attributes is critical to a ROBO's success. However, because of each ROBO's
specific needs, there are no real roadmaps for building and implementing architecture for a
remote office.

Virtualization has had a huge impact on ROBOs. From reduced equipment footprints and lower
setup costs, to simpler management workloads and faster deployment of new services,
virtualized environments have become the natural choice for ROBOs.

92 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine November 2016 Edition
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