Compared to traditional backup, Symantec say their approach enables 100 times faster backup, eases management and simplifies recovery if a disaster occurs, helping customers realise significant cost savings while better protecting their business information.
Over the last 20 years data has exploded, virtualisation has become widely adopted and service level agreements (SLA’s) have become near impossible to meet. These challenges also affect the smaller businesses that struggle with backup complexity and are at risk of data loss due to a disaster. The current approach to modernisation introduces an ever-growing collection of point solutions resulting in added complexity, increased costs and headaches for backup administrators, network administrators and executives.
“The single most dramatic change is scale – or volume – of data, applications and virtual machines which cannot be processed by current backup environments. Organisations have increased service level agreements, rising expectations of availability and the need to run in a 24/7 business model. When combined with trying to integrate new technologies, it adds up to a disruptive environment with a huge impact on IT teams. Organisations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming,” said Dave Russell, vice president of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner.
“Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernise data protection that will drive out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president of Symantec’s Information Management Group. “Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in backup – from the most complex of enterprise data centres requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data.”
Symantec recently surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals worldwide on their backup practices and their ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings reveal that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is vitally needed.
According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. Half of respondents do not have a plan in place and 41 percent said that it never occurred to them to put together a disaster recovery plan. The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting an SMB at risk of going out of business.