As your company collects more data, the need to ensure data availability increases. This inevitably leads to backup and recovery solutions, but it is crucial to have a data protection plan before deciding on a solution.

Veritas NetBackup is one such solution, unifying data protection across all environments and assuring data availability and integrity.

This article will explore a four-step approach to data protection planning to help you adopt a strategy that achieves your business goals.

Step 1: Consider your organisation’s backup needs

Backup is crucial to preserving data, but how much of your data needs backing up? You will eat into storage and increase costs if you back up non-critical data.

Evaluate your data sources. Consider the following:

  • Databases
  • Data lakes
  • Legacy
  • Big data
  • Containers
  • Devices
  • Virtual machines

From 2020 to 2022, the annual growth in enterprise data was 42.2% on average, and this is expected to increase over the next few years.

Step 2: Evaluate your backup and recovery strategy

How will you back up data? What are your objectives? Perhaps you require immediate access to data or an advanced search engine to pull queries.

Consider your application recovery objectives and time objectives with backup; these will determine the types of solutions relevant to your organisation. Determine how much data you can bear to lose and how long an outage should last.

Next, consider your storage requirements. Where will protected data reside? You might require on-premises long-term data retention with a disk-based solution, or you might meet data protection standards with only a cloud storage solution.

Step 3: Select backup and recovery solution

Ideally, your backup and recovery solution should support every workload so that all data streams into that single solution. Multiple systems open you up to error and data loss, so it is always best to find a single solution.

Look for the following features in a good solution:

  • Granular restore
  • Intelligent deduplication
  • Snapshots
  • Storage tiering
  • Disaster recovery
  • Container support
  • Data insight
  • Compliance with security standards

Step 4: Do Your Research

Closely scrutinise the backup and recovery solutions you choose. Compare features, pricing, support, update times and the ecosystem.

Look into the leadership of the solutions – do reputable people own them? Is the company one you can trust to handle your data requirements? Consider how the solution will fit your organisation in the long term.

Lastly, don’t neglect the importance of understanding data protection and your requirements as the processor/controller. Data protection has a relentless rate of change, so always seek legal advice when unsure.

If you want to discuss your data protection planning in more detail please feel free to get in touch.