Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2023

Be Demanding but Realistic Any organization which adopts these five best practices and evaluates target-based deduplication appliances based on them will likely find very few appliances satisfy them in total. To date, organi zations have largely measured deduplication appliances on how quickly they back up data and the deduplication results they achieve. Meeting most of the criteria listed here was barely on their radar screens even as recently as a few years ago. However, organizations need to demand more from providers of target-based deduplication providers. The gap between what organiza tions need these appliances to provide in their hybrid clouds and what these appliances cur rently deliver remains signifi cant. Organizations need to start demanding providers begin delivering on their expectations for baseline hybrid cloud fea tures. They must reward those which do meet them. Only then will organizations see broader availability of needed baseline features and functionality in these appliances they need to properly deploy them in their hybrid clouds. v

n Secure the backup data they host from ransomware attacks on the appliance itself. n Provide options for fast restores from the backup data. Target-based deduplication appliances primarily secure backup data from ransomware in three ways. 1. They may provide options to air gap deduplicated backup data. In this way, even if ransomware attacks them, it cannot access these air gapped backups. 2. They may offer an option to lock the data. If available and turned on, this may prevent internal and/or external bad actors from accessing and deleting or encrypting the data. 3. They may support multi factor authentication (MFA) Ransomware may also com promise production data. If this occurs, organizations may turn to deduplication appli ances to quickly restore the data. Identify appliances which permit access to as much of its deduplicated data as possible for fast restores. Some only permit access to a small subset of its data or data associated with a limited number of VMs. Also confirm the restore times associated with the appliance’s instant restore fea ture, if available, meets your organization’s restore time requirements. Appliance pro viders may measure the instant restore times of their appliance in minutes or even hours. to control access to the appliance and the data stored on it.

they do not want an applica tion to have one set of features and functionality in one cloud and a different set if deployed in another. Identify an application they may deploy in the hybrid cloud which possesses the same fea ture set regardless of where they deploy it. Organizations should ide ally select target-based dedu plication appliances which follow this best practice. It should support the same fea tures (capacity thresholds, data immutability, deduplica tion, encryption, replication, etc.) regardless of the cloud into which it gets deployed. It should also offer comparable functionality in backup and restore throughput rates across all the clouds as well. Best Practice #4: Validate the target-based deduplication appliance satisfies growing requirements for heightened data security and faster recoveries. Most if not all organiza tions have experienced some form of ransomware attack. Even if they have successfully defended against it to date, ran somware attacks continue to become more sophisticated. So whether ransomware attacks production data, backup data, or both, organizations must put in places additional measures to protect their data. As deduplication appliances primarily host backup data, they should minimally offer two specific features to help organizations defend against ransomware:

Best Practice #5: Verify the target-based deduplication appliance offers a management console which centrally monitors and manages appliance instances in the hybrid cloud. Monitoring and managing one, two, or even three or more applications by logging into each one may not present a con cern. However, the more appli cations organizations deploy, the more they need a manage ment console to centrally moni tor and manage them. To meet this requirement, the provider may offer its own management software to manage the deployment of its applications. Alternatively, it may integrate with a third party platform which performs these management functions. Ideally, the appliance supports both options so organizations may select the option which best meets its needs. Organizations should also verify what monitoring and management features the management console offers. Organizations should look for a management console to ide ally provide reporting capabili ties such as: n The physical and logical location where the appliance resides n The health of the appliance n Alerting on the breaching of any preset capacity or performance thresholds It will also ideally track the number of software licenses an organization owns, where they currently exist, and allocate avail able licenses to new instances.

Jerome Wendt, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, is the president and founder of DCIG, LLC., a technology analyst firm. DCIG, LLC.,

focuses on providing competitive intel ligence for the enterprise data protection, data storage, disaster recovery, and cloud technology markets.

36 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2023

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