The blog talks about the challenges that organizations face to deploy Backup plans and how IBM Spectrum Protect is designed to simplify backup administration in physical, virtual, software-defined and cloud environments.

 

Today, every organization needs a backup and disaster recovery mechanism in place. Any loss or compromise of critical business and customer data can result in serious financial, and even legal, ramifications.

 

However, many organizations still use the traditional methods for backup, which can cause a lot of issues. Let us have a look at some of the major ones –

 

Magnetic tapes vulnerable to corruption

The traditional backup methods involve backing up of data on tape storage. As data is stored to the magnetic media, any slight, accidental damage to the magnetized area can corrupt the data and render it useless. As this type of backup relies on manual intervention, the risk of damage is too great. Moreover, it is almost impossible to detect the corruption until you try to restore the data.

 

Challenge of keeping up with data growth

Data keeps growing exponentially, and the storage capacity of backup tapes is not sufficient to meet such huge amounts. You will need to continuously invest in expanding your tape libraries, resulting in increased storage expenses. Moreover, as data growth is unpredictable, you cannot even be sure how much extra space you will require.

 

Inadequate disaster recovery mechanism

In traditional backup methods, the backup data is usually stored at the same site as the primary data. However, natural disasters like flood, fire or earthquakes can strike anytime. In such cases, both copies will be destroyed. Even if you have stored your backup tapes in a different location that stays unaffected by the disaster, moving them back to your primary site will not be easy. Moreover, if the system required to restore tapes is also destroyed, the backup tapes will be useless.

 

Slow recovery times

Traditional backup units take a very long time to recover data. If you are trying to restore data at a critical time, the delay in recovery can seriously impact your business operations and revenue.

 

IBM Spectrum Protect – A scalable data protection solution

IBM Spectrum Protect is designed to simplify backup administration in physical, virtual, software-defined and cloud environments. Along with built-in cloud integration for simple and cost-efficient backup to cloud, the solution can reduce your backup infrastructure costs by 53% and easily scale to accomodate massive data growth.