Q&A with Unitrends: What companies need to know about Unified Backup
Data is exploding at a scale never witnessed before. Today, data lives in many different places — on-premises data centers, endpoints, cloud environments and SaaS applications. Cybercriminals and error-prone employees constantly threaten this largely distributed business-critical data. Also, with industry regulations constantly evolving, companies should take suitable measures and develop robust backup and recovery strategies to ensure their systems and data are secure. Data protection is no longer an IT responsibility alone but an indispensable business strategy to enhance efficiency as well as security in this increasingly digitized world.
We recently caught up with Joseph Noonan, general manager of Backup and Disaster Recovery at Kaseya, whose Unified Backup platform encompasses data protection for on-premises systems, cloud workloads, SaaS applications and remote endpoints, such as PCs and laptop devices. In this Q&A, Joe talks about the value of a unified backup strategy for modern businesses.
General Manager of Backup and Disaster Recovery at Kaseya
Let’s get right to it. Why are organizations struggling today with data protection?
Today, organizations of all shapes and sizes are creating data at an unprecedented rate to compete in a digital economy. As a result, that data has sprawled beyond the traditional data center, forcing many businesses to use multiple solutions to protect it. Disparate tools from different vendors offer limited integration, if at all, resulting in inefficiencies, interoperability challenges and vendor fatigue. It also increases costs, complexity, time spent managing backups and IT burden as well as hampers productivity.
While on the one hand, cyberthreats have increased significantly, on the other, IT budgets are flat or shrinking. Finding and hiring skilled IT professionals is cumbersome and expensive in today’s market. In short, IT teams are being asked to do more with less.
How has BCDR evolved recently to offset these challenges?
In an always-on business environment, organizations today have little tolerance for downtime. At the same time, we’re seeing threats like ransomware still growing at an alarming rate and the bad guys are going after data regardless of where it lives. Organizations need a unified backup approach to drive resilience for all of their data, whether on-premises, in public cloud infrastructure, in SaaS applications or on endpoints like PCs and laptops. Recovery is the critical component here; you want to ensure your solution provides you with proof and confidence that you can recover in any situation, from an accidental deletion to a lost device, a ransomware attack and everything in between. And we’re working in a tough economic climate; customers tell us all the time that they’re looking for a solution that offers them a predictable cost, especially when it comes to working in the cloud.
Modern-day BCDR solutions are comprehensive, intelligent, automated and affordable. These solutions provide superior data protection by eliminating time-consuming and fallible manual processes, improve admin efficiency and do so at a low, transparent cost.
Is that what you mean by “Unified Backup”?
Yes. A unified backup solution is purpose-built to streamline data protection, simplify complex systems and provide a holistic experience with visibility across your entire backup infrastructure. For example, our platform, Unitrends Unified Backup and Disaster Recovery, utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to protect against cyberattacks and human error. Different approaches to backup, whether
on-prem or in the cloud, are all managed centrally through a single portal called UniView. It enables IT admins to monitor and manage protection for all their workloads from one place without switching between different applications.
Unitrends Unified Backup is a powerful and complete platform that combines enterprise-class backup, ransomware detection and cloud-empowered business continuity.
What should organizations be looking for in a solution?
Businesses should look for an all-in-one backup solution that offers superior protection against cyberthreats, helps eliminate data loss and downtime, and is easy on their wallet. A smart and intelligent backup solution in an organization’s tech stack can further improve its resilience. An efficient backup and DR solution uses AI and machine learning (ML) to detect suspicious activities and alert security professionals before they cause any damage. AI-powered assistants like Unitrends BackupIQ help customize and prioritize backup issues with rule-based alerts and improve efficiency by enabling IT to focus on the issues most important to their environment.
Another important feature to consider in a backup and recovery solution is the capability to tackle phishing and account takeover attacks. Dark web monitoring is fully embedded in our SaaS backup solutions and scans the dark web for compromised or stolen credentials. Businesses should opt for solutions with automation functionality like Unitrends Helix that automatically monitors, detects and
remediates issues before they impact backup and recovery. A backup solution with automation capabilities not only saves time and maximizes productivity but also reduces the chance of errors.
What techniques do organizations implement to successfully combat modern cyberattacks and make DR more effective and faster?
Threat actors are evolving rapidly and becoming more sophisticated. They are now going after backups, attempting to disable, encrypt and delete them completely. It makes data recovery (DR) increasingly difficult for businesses in the event of a cybersecurity incident. Resilience is key here; resilience can be ensured for backups by utilizing two-factor authentication (2FA), encryption and immutable storage. It also applies to the backup process itself — making sure that you get good, working backups — for example, environmental remediation to solve issues like VSS writers that could impact backups or pause-resume capabilities for direct-to-cloud backups, so the backup doesn’t fail if the internet connection drops off.
Equally important is confidence; knowing that you’ve got a good, reliable backup, when it ran and how long it takes to recover it. Solutions that automate things like screenshot verification and DR runbook testing provide that confidence while reducing the burden of running manual tests, mounting images to validate file restores and so on. Many organizations struggling with hiring and budgetary challenges are turning to hosted Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions where the vendor performs the hosting, management, monitoring and testing of the recovery environment, eliminating the need to maintain a secondary site and providing disaster recovery at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
As follow-up, are there approaches or techniques that have not withstood the test of time? Any mistakes DR practitioners should avoid?
As workloads continue to sprawl, traditional backup and recovery methods are becoming less effective. These solutions are siloed and offer limited automation, placing the burden on IT and increasing the chance of errors. One critical aspect many organizations still struggle with is disaster recovery testing — traditionally, it’s manual, expensive and disruptive.
Yet, testing is crucial to ensure the recovery plan works when it’s needed the most. At Unitrends, our Unified Backup platform automates recovery testing that eliminates manual intervention and management hassles by automatically orchestrating application-level recovery testing. It fully restores applications, performs analytics, measures recovery time and recovery point actuals, and identifies conditions that would prevent a successful recovery for proactive remediation. Fully automated DR tests simulate a true disaster scenario to keep businesses prepared and ready to recover at a moment’s notice.
Final words?
At Unitrends, we believe it’s time to reimagine how we do IT and take advantage of new, available architectures and technology to transform siloed, legacy IT management and security approaches into a complete business solution. For many, the narrow, task-based process of piecemealed legacy solutions has left gaps in coverage, invited complexity and left organizations bogged down in low-value, manual tasks. That’s why we’ve built the new IT Complete platform, a full suite of critical, integrated IT solutions that enable seamless workflows between tools. The IT Complete platform is meticulously designed to help organizations shift from a conventional approach to a solution-focused approach, simplify IT management and security, and empower IT teams to meet the burgeoning demands of a constantly changing business environment.
About Unitrends
Unitrends makes efficient, reliable backup and recovery as effortless and hassle-free as possible. We combine deep expertise gained over 30 years of focusing on backup and recovery with next-generation backup appliances and cloud, purpose-built to make data protection simpler, more automated and more resilient than any other solution in the industry.
Ready to achieve 100% recovery confidence? Book a personalized Unitrends demo here.
Related Categories