What’s your #1 application?
Ask people to identify their company’s biggest and most important application, and the responses will vary widely. Senior managers may pick core financial systems, sales people may choose customer-facing websites, and there will always be a number of votes for email and other critical communication systems. However, most of the answers will be wrong. In point of fact, the biggest and most important application for any organisation is always backup.
Without data, businesses are nothing. No data means no customers, no products, no suppliers, no solutions, no employees – nothing. And because data in live systems is always potentially at risk of loss or corruption, businesses need a fall-back position based on keeping a robust backup copy of everything. For this reason, backup touches – or should touch – every critical application in any organisation.
The risk of getting it wrong
Given multiple different types of application, running on multiple platforms and with different tolerances of downtime, most businesses have a complex mix of backup solutions governed by a bewildering variety of rules and schedules.
Complexity inevitably raises costs. More important, complexity also brings significant risk into the equation. Many businesses lack a clear view of all their backups and are dependent on numerous niche skillsets. Backup failure rates are often high, and practical tests that the backed-up data can actually be recovered are few and far between. So even though businesses are sinking more and more money into backup, few are truly confident that their data is actually protected. This was already the case when businesses only had to worry about systems in their own data centres. As workloads move to the cloud, the complexity and uncertainty are growing.
Take back control
In a multi-app, multi-platform, multi-cloud world, how do you take back control of backup to gain certainty that your data is protected and can be recovered rapidly in the event of a disaster? How do you manage the differences in backup approaches between core systems running on platforms such as IBM Power versus ancillary systems on cloud-hosted servers? How do you maintain backup success without employing armies of specialised IT personnel? How do you free up existing staff from the drudgery of late-night logins to troubleshoot and fix failures?
As a value-add reseller and provider of managed services around Cobalt Iron Compass, Northdoor can help you modernise and optimise your entire backup regime to take advantage of deep analytics, AI-powered automation and cloud-based technology. Compass™ provides a single pane of glass to manage the entire enterprise backup landscape, with detailed reporting and advanced administrative functionality.
Greater success, lower effort
With Compass™ from Northdoor, backup success rates of 99 percent become the norm, as the solution automatically applies common fixes as well as lessons learned from other enterprises’ backup jobs. The backup regime can follow your data and workflows wherever they go, enabling data protection to be consumed as a service. Built on top of IBM Spectrum Protect technology, the solution offers both easy integration with all major public cloud environments and full compatibility with specialised environments such as IBM i on IBM Power Systems servers. It also takes full advantage of advanced functionality on IBM Storage systems.
Compass™ from Northdoor unites backup tasks of all kinds, providing a single intuitive point of control that enables IT personnel to focus on the bigger picture rather than tinkering with command-line interfaces. The solution can bring dramatic reductions in hardware and software costs for backup, typically reducing expenditure by 50 to 70 percent versus legacy backup approaches. By largely eliminating the need for deep subject matter expertise across multiple backup applications, the solution also saves significant time and effort, enabling IT personnel to focus on ensuring that the enterprise’s data is truly protected at all times.
For more information, see our solution brief