Data Management-as-a-Service: Understanding the Technology

Organizations need a simplified yet scalable approach to managing the company’s most critical data. The “silo” approaches — where information is inefficiently replicated across redundant storage types and locations with no central controls or visibility — are no longer sustainable. IT and business leaders are in the midst of the largest technology and process refresh in recent history. An evolution needs to take place in the way that businesses consume data protection, and the cloud needs to be at the center of that evolution. As more organizations embrace this digital transformation, a growing number of infrastructure and application services are migrating to the cloud to consume data management-as-a-Service (DMaaS).

The Digital Transformation

This digital transformation includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the leveraging of platform as a service (PaaS) providers, and the massive adoption of software as a service (SaaS) applications (e.g., MS Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce). A fundamental transformation has occurred within today’s data architecture — it has become a combination of local data storage (including data centers, branch offices, and endpoints) and cloud data storage (including IaaS, cloud apps, and PaaS).

Understanding all the various technology options available to manage and protect an ever-growing list of data sources has made it increasingly difficult for the IT professionals responsible for their organizations’ data protection technology decisions to move forward with their initiatives.

The Legacy Approach

An organization may have grown their traditional siloed data-protection infrastructure organically as the size of their business has grown; however, this approach has significant limitations, and the effectiveness of current hardware solutions has hit a wall. Backing-up primary servers, adding email archiving, setting up disaster recovery, purchasing compliance-monitoring systems, adding more offices that require their own systems and infrastructure, and then putting cloud applications into the mix have  proven how the silo model is not sufficiently scalable and does not meet the needs of the business. Multiple data sources mean more repositories to protect and manage as well as more data sources to monitor for compliance and search for eDiscovery. While these on-premises legacy solutions have served their intended purpose in the past, the underlying architectures that were originally meant to support a tape-based workflow are buckling under the demands of today’s information management.

Because of the variety of local data sources and the expansion of cloud data sources, legacy backup solutions have become a logistical mess of unscalable and ineffective data silos.

Data Risk

Having visibility into your data (i.e., being able to quickly and efficiently determine the type of data, where it lives, and who’s responsibile for it) is no longer a luxury — it’s a legal and regulatory necessity. Data risks include the constant threat of ransomware, data loss from accidental or malicious deletion, interruptions in business continuity, and the challenges that come with “dark data” including an overall lack of governance and the inability to meet litigation or compliance requirements.

DMaaS – A Simplified Approach

A DMaaS data protection model that is cloud-native and consumption-based dramatically eases the burden that organizations face when planning their digital transformation roadmaps. It can be a daunting task to navigate the complexity of managing and protecting multiple data sources as well as having to adhere to strict regulatory requirements and meeting the eDiscovery needs of the business. DMaaS provides central access and data visibility while mitigating the legal and regulatory risk, all within a cost-efficient pay-as-you-go pricing model that delivers a significant lower total cost of ownership (TCO). A DMaaS solution includes the following key benefits:

Assures Comprehensive Data Collection — A DMaaS platform reaches into all the places where enterprise data hides, from servers and desktops to tablets, smartphones, and cloud apps. This provides IT teams with the confidence that they are getting all the data.

Simplifies Backup and Recovery — Traditional backup systems can be slow, cumbersome, and expensive in terms of both the hardware and the administrative costs. Conversely, DMaaS stores a single, secondary copy of all data in the cloud infrastructure, making local backup hardware no longer necessary.

Works across Worldwide Locations — Because the cloud is independent of any physical location, your IT folks can restore server or desktop data from a hotel room halfway around the world just as easily as they can from a desk in the data center.

Ensures Compliance with Regulations ­— Relying on individual IT departments to manage information for complex and evolving compliance issues can put a company at risk of human error. The cloud system can be configured to monitor for certain types of legal and regulatory compliance issues and to send alerts whenever adjustments need to be made for standards like HIPAA or FedRAMP.

Makes eDiscovery Quicker and Easier — Digging up company information that’s relevant to a pending lawsuit can be a time‐consuming task when data is distributed across many storage locations. But with cloud information management, data is proactively collected, which makes the entire process quicker and easier.

Saves Money Compared to Other Options — Over a three-year period, cloud‐based information management can save the average company 65 percent in expenses, compared to traditional systems like hardware‐based backup devices and silo‐centric data analysis tools.

DMaaS Essential Elements

When you’re looking for a DMaaS platform for your organization, you should expect it to collect and consolidate raw and extended metadata from various sources (e.g., file servers, virtual machines, endpoints, and SaaS applications) and create a secondary, golden copy of this data in the cloud. The platform should have a highly optimized backup engine that collects raw and extended metadata and stores it completely deduplicated, removing the need for redundant backup copies.

The solution lies in the federation of information, where efficiently stored copies of the data from all sources are brought together and indexed as metadata as well as full‐text to provide a single point for meaningful, searchable information. A DMaaS mirrors, indexes, and tracks all existing content so that it can be accessed from the cloud and acted upon at any time. All system and device data are synchronized at regular intervals as specified by the IT manager, so it’s never out of date.

Druva Delivers DMaaS

Druva’s approach ensures data availability and information governance across servers, endpoints, and cloud applications. Policies are created and centrally managed by IT with granular settings such as what file types and locations are backed up, how disaster recovery will occur, and the tiering of data for archiving in the cloud — all without the heavy burden of infrastructure. Druva delivers a 100% SaaS solution that brings together backup, archival, and disaster recovery features to harness the ease of use and scalability of the public cloud.

The Druva Cloud Platform is built with the company’s Galaxy engine as its backbone. Galaxy offers industry-leading Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) by leveraging machine learning to automate policy tuning and heuristics. This allows the Druva Cloud Platform to quickly perform file backups based on projected usage. It also optimizes load balancing by handling small and large files differently, allowing for better performance consistency. The end result is data backups that are two times faster as well as a five-fold improvement in backup times for small files.

The Druva DMaaS offering includes

• A single platform that integrates protection and management for endpoints and server and cloud data — all delivered as a service.
• Data protection that includes backup, availability, disaster recovery, and workload mobility to ensures your data is available and recoverable regardless of the source.
• Data governance that includes archiving, compliance, eDiscovery, and data sovereignty and simplifies the process of meeting increasing data compliance and inquiry requests.
• Data intelligence provides predictive early assessment, data forensics, and information lifecycle management so your organization can stay ahead of business data risks.
• Zero infrastructure uses single data model architecture, with no hardware required, which results in dramatically lower TCO for your business.

By leveraging Druva’s next-generation solutions for cloud data protection, organizations can skip the hardware requirements, disk management, and cluster setup of legacy solutions. With Druva, organizations can manage all global data through a single pane of glass and take advantage of advanced data intelligence features to control risks and meet today’s compliance requirements.