The massive shift to remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic kickstarted many companies’ digital transformation. While this transition had already begun for most organizations, the pandemic sped up the timeline. These events also had an impact on how storage and backup is done. Let’s look at why the right storage solution is key to your backup and disaster recovery strategy, especially when it comes to today’s work-from-home and hybrid scenarios.
Hybrid Cloud and Storage
While most companies have moved to the cloud in some form or another, many are relying on a hybrid approach. Enterprises may want to maintain their primary data storage on-premises for performance, security and compliance reasons. The public cloud, though, offers compelling services that can enhance this on-premises data.
Using both the public cloud and on-premises storage allows for hybrid cloud use cases that are changing the way enterprise IT leaders think about data management and data protection. Enterprises are implementing hybrid cloud architectures to take advantage of cloud archive services, to maintain full copies of their on-premises data for disaster recovery, to protect against ransomware attacks, to take advantage of cloud service bursting and more.
Businesses retain greater control over their private data by using hybrid cloud services. An organization can store sensitive data on a private cloud or local data center and, at the same time, make use of the robust computational resources of a managed public cloud. A hybrid cloud relies on a single plane of management, unlike a multi-cloud strategy that forces administrators to manage each cloud environment separately.
Remote Work has Changed the Backup and Recovery Game
Companies risk losing their most valuable assets – their data – if they lack strong backup and recovery infrastructure. Data loss affects businesses directly, when assets can no longer be leveraged, or indirectly, via loss of customer confidence and regulatory fines and penalties.
The shift to remote work means that the way storage and backup is done has also changed. If the majority of a workforce is remote now, how do you back up laptops? How do you back up phones? Previously, employees would go to an office and their laptop and other devices would get backed up there – but now, that’s not the case. And with remote work in place for the long haul for many companies, backup methods have to change and adapt.
Remote work opens up greater risks of information being stolen or lost. If an employee is at home, for instance, and they lose a file on their computer – and they’re used to having their computer backed up by the company – how do they restart that backup? If they have to go through IT, that seemingly simple act can take weeks.
Self-Service Backup and Recovery
Organizations need to have more flexibility – a way for individuals to perform backups in a self-service way without having to deal with centralized IT. In this way, people can protect their data themselves.
With the right storage solution, authentication is built in; storage and backup are designed with security and data protection in mind. Unlike other storage solutions, object storage gives you your own keys and your own passwords, and you only see what you should. It’s very well protected. It’s also very siloed, so that employees can only do what the company wants them to be able to do, and they only have the minimum access they need. So, object storage can help organizations adopt a more fine-grained authentication and security posture; more so than with a typical file storage solution.
In addition, having this kind of solution in place opens opportunities to provide your employees with the kind of self-service backup and recovery they need in a remote world where speed is of the essence and efficiency is front-and-center.
Success in a Hybrid World
The shift to the cloud is in full swing for many organizations, brought on by a variety of business factors and accelerated, in many instances, by the pandemic. It makes sense that the hybrid storage approach would become popular, as organizations naturally want to keep certain kinds of data close to the vest for security and/or compliance reasons. Performance is another consideration when it comes to where data should be stored.
This gives organizations a lot to think and strategize about – including how to handle backup and recovery in a WFH world. Remote work increases security threats, so organizations need the option to empower employees to protect their own data. Object storage makes this possible with both speed and efficiency. There are many options available today for both cloud and storage configurations, so consider the above points when making decisions that will affect the security, compliance and performance needs of your organization.
