#CurrentStatus Episode 56 covers is data protection important?  Co-hosts Phoummala SchmittTheresa Miller and guest Michael Letschin discuss the importance of data protection to the enterprise even when your data is in the cloud.  What is data protection and is it just backups or is it the ability to do even more.  Let’s dive in!

Do you need Data Protection?

You definitely need data recovery, and how you save that data and backup that data does matter.  Unexpected things happen, mistakes happen and if you cannot recover your data it will be hard to recover.  Data disasters can put a company out of business.  Data protection is not business continuity, so these should be separate initiatives.

Ransomware

Without the right data protection data can be very challenging to get back.  Ransomware starts with patching and other layers of protection, but you should still have data protection as another layer of defense.  There are layers to all of this, business, process and then test to make sure the protection plan works for ransomware and anything that can cause a data disaster.

Is Data Protection an Insurance Policy?

Is it an insurance policy.  Yes, it is, but it shouldn’t be the only line of defense.  Have those layers to protect you from any data disaster.  Be sure to be testing.

#CurrentStatus Episode and Recording

Use Backups to Create Test/Dev

Test/Dev is critical so be sure to protect it, but also choose a backup solution that will allow you to create test/dev from production.  This will save you on standing up a separate test/dev environment, ensure that your test/dev is as accurate as it can be for development, and this also ensures that important development or testing is protected.  Make sure you backup test/dev and have a solution that will allow you to use your backups for the test/dev use case.

Archiving

Backup your data and archive your memories.  A true data protection solution should be able to archive your data.  Archived elsewhere, perhaps in the cloud.  You may not need access to this data later where it lives doesn’t matter, but still gives you access to that data on a more affordable storage platform.

Cloud First

It should be able to protection hybrid environments.  On-prem and cloud.  Tune into the podcast link above to learn what is shared in this podcast today.

Concluding Thoughts

Having data protection; which is more that backups, is necessary for on-prem and cloud.  A single solution that allows for disaster recovery, archiving, test/dev and stand backup and recovery is necessary.  Be prepared for any situation, because an enterprise cannot predict when a data disaster will impact your enterprise data no matter where it resides.

In case you missed it, we also recently covered VMware on Azure which can be found here.