The Impact of Changing Data Protection Requirements on Your Infrastructure

The new state of data protection, whereby enterprises must protect copy data quantities that are growing exponentially on a global basis with instant, up-to-the-minute recovery, places new demands on the secondary storage infrastructure.

The key problem lies in the fact that data protection infrastructure is becoming more fragmented by use case. In the past, many organizations standardized on a singular data protection solution. Today, it is common for multiple data protection solutions to coexist in the data center. This is largely because applications and workloads have more individualized recovery and retention requirements that must be met. Also, many data protection solutions, whether legacy or newer, do not yet support some new applications and workloads.

While most applications carry demanding recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), some are stricter than others. Additionally, certain applications might be fueling secondary business initiatives such as application development or analytics, creating implications for what data needs to be restored and how quickly it must get back online. Additionally, the growing number of data privacy regulations will impact enterprise offices in specific regions of the world, and can impact certain applications more than others. Application owners typically want a best-of-breed solution that meets their particular need. Further contributing to this sprawl, it is becoming more common for some data protection capabilities to be built directly into the applications themselves, which the application owner might want to take advantage of.