Cost-Effective Solutions for Data Protection
By: Alex Lim
Tags: Data Science, Data, Cybersecurity, Security, Technology

Data is effectively the currency of powering the digital economy. Technologies such as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning enable organizations to unearth all kinds of insights from their data and gain a competitive edge. The threats to data are continuing to grow, but by deploying the latest data protection technologies, companies can cost-effectively safeguard their information.

Key Takeaways:

The Mistake of Undervaluing Data.

Cost-Effective Solutions of Data Protection.

Why It’s Time to Act Now.

The stakes are much too high for MSPs to undervalue their data and fail to protect their IT resources adequately. Read this article and learn about cost-effective data protection solutions to keep your business data safe.

Table of contents

Introduction

The Mistake of Undervaluing Data

Cost-Effective Solutions for Data Protection

Conclusion: It’s Time to Act

Introduction

There has been a lot of discussion about the rising value of information — that data is effectively the currency powering the digital economy. Technologies such as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning enable organizations to unearth all kinds of insights from their data and gain a competitive edge.

In light of the strategic value of information for all types of organizations, it’s surprising that many small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as some managed services providers (MSPs), still seem hesitant to do all they can to protect their data resources at all times. A lot of these businesses are failing to take into consideration the true value of their data when evaluating storage and data protection technologies.

With so much riding on the security, reliability, and availability of these data resources — perhaps even the survival of the businesses themselves — technology executives must prioritize deploying the solutions their companies need to keep data as safe and secure as possible.

The Mistake of Undervaluing Data

How valuable is data to a company? It isn’t easy to place a specific value on any given piece of information. But for intellectual property, trade secrets, personal customer information, and other competitive data, the cost of losing this resource can be enormous.

In its 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the Ponemon Institute said the global average cost of a data breach climbed to $3.92 million. Between 2014 and 2019, the average total cost of a data breach increased 12 percent based on costs associated with breaches at 507 organizations in 16 countries across 17 industry sectors.

The study also notes the challenges businesses face in the aftermath of a data breach. Ponemon found that the time it takes for organizations to identify and contain a breach — what it calls the data breach lifecycle — stretches 279 days. The longer a breach’s lifecycle extends, the greater the total cost, according to the report.

Malicious and criminal attacks are the leading root cause of data breaches, followed by technology failures and human error. Much attention in the security market is placed on malicious attacks, the Ponemon study states, but breaches caused by system glitches and employee mistakes can have consequences that are just as serious.

While the estimated costs of data breaches do not necessarily capture the value of the data itself, they do provide a good indication of the damage done to a business when data is compromised. This makes it all the more perplexing when companies, including many mid-sized and smaller businesses, do not take the time and make the investments needed to protect their data resources. Their perceived value of data protection solutions does not equal the actual value of protecting the data or the cost of data loss stemming from risky or improper use of tape storage, ransomware, and other security attacks.

The fact is, many companies think the price of solutions to protect their data is too high. But if they end up suffering a breach in their data centers, or if they experience a human error or ransomware attacks that result in the loss or theft of data, it could mean tremendous financial losses. In some cases, it could even threaten their ability to continue doing business.

When it comes down to it, the cost of data protection platforms is minimal compared with the value of what these solutions protect.

Cost-Effective Solutions for Data Protection

Solutions such as those offered by Dell EMC enable even small companies to gain the data protection capabilities that large enterprises have deployed. Dell EMC data protection offers the lowest cost per GB in the industry, on-premises or in the cloud. The data protection architecture offers the best deduplication, compression, performance, and data resiliency available.

Among the key benefits that Dell Expert Network members enjoy are centralized management and reporting across multiple instances, whether a company is managing one or hundreds of systems. For example, PowerProtect DD3300 is a cloud-enabled appliance for modern data protection, with support for Dell EMC Cloud Tier and Dell EMC Cloud Disaster Recovery. The product is specifically designed to meet the needs of SMB IT environments as well as remote or branch office IT environments: It provides enterprise-class protection storage in a compact, 2U storage appliance and can be used for data backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and long-term cloud retention.

PowerProtect DD3300 is available in four configurations based on useable capacity: 4TB, 8TB, 16TB or 32TB. By leveraging Dell EMC’s advanced deduplication and native cloud tiering, DD3300 can manage up to 4.8PB of logical capacity.

Another offering, the Integrated Data Protection Appliance (DP4400), gives Dell Expert Network members a converged, all-in-one data appliance boasting complete data backup, replication, recovery, instant access and restore, search and analytics, and VMware integration. It also offers disaster recovery and long-term retention in the cloud. The DP4400 features integrated data protection in a 2U form factor that combines protection storage, software, and cloud readiness. Because the system is easy to manage, deploy and upgrade — and can scale from 8TB to 24TB in 4TB increments and from 24TB to 96TB in 12TB increments — it’s ideal for small and growing companies.

Dell EMC also offers PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE), which provides software-defined protection storage on-premises and in the cloud. DDVE is designed to be simple to download, deploy, and configure, and can be deployed on any standard hardware (converged or hyper-converged). It runs in VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, and in the cloud with AWS, AWS GovCloud, VMware Cloud, Azure, Azure Government Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform.

DDVE is also certified with VxRail and Dell PowerEdge servers. Companies can run an assessment tool during deployment to check the underlying infrastructure to ensure that it meets the recommended requirements. A single DDVE instance can scale up to 96TB in the cloud. Capacity can be moved between virtual systems and locations and can scale in increments of 1TB, which allows companies to grow capacity as their business demands.

Another solution SMBs can leverage is Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, a software-defined data management platform for application workloads, virtual machines, and Kubernetes containers. The platform provides trusted data protection and data management and enables the protection of workloads, including Oracle, SQL, SAP HANA, and file systems, in addition to Kubernetes containers and virtual environments. Dell Expert Network members can restore data on-premises or in the cloud. PowerProtect Data Manager extends data protection to the cloud by tiering backups to cloud storage for long-term retention; organizations can maximize retention and access to backups without impacting on-premises protection storage resources.

Finally, Dell EMC provides Cyber Recovery Services, allowing companies to keep isolated copies of their most critical data off production networks and separated from production backup systems. Dell Technologies Consulting Services accelerates the deployment of these services through advisory and implementation phases: The advisory phase focuses on providing recommendations to quickly integrate and optimize Cyber Recovery in a data protection environment. The implementation phase integrates the Cyber Recovery Services into a company’s data protection environment, using information gathered through the advisory phase further to customize the services to the company’s needs.

Organizations that have implemented the Dell EMC technology are seeing significant benefits in terms of data protection. And for companies in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, having the assurance of safe data is a high priority. For example, healthcare provider Seattle Proton Therapy deployed Dell EMC DP4400 appliances to solve an immediate capacity need for backing up patients’ medical records while at the same time complying with government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“Our data is very crucial; it’s patients’ records, and we’re mandated by the government to protect it,” says Eric Cole, associate director of IT at Seattle Proton Therapy. “It’s essential for us to make sure we’re protecting and backing up that data for our patients.”

Before implementing Dell appliances, data restore processes would take a week or two, Cole says. With the appliances, this process now takes a matter of minutes: Data is still backed up on-site, but it is also replicated offsite on a second DP4400.

Cole cites ease of deployment with a small learning curve, as well as support from Dell engineers, among the most appealing aspects of deploying the solution. It’s now also easier for users to access data they need when they need it, he adds.

“I can sleep at night knowing that our data is protected well by the DP4400,” Cole says.

Conclusion: It’s Time to Act

The stakes are much too high for SMBs and managed services providers to undervalue their data and fail to protect their IT resources adequately. The costs of lost or stolen data can be extremely high, doing significant damage to businesses with limited resources.

The threats to data continue to grow — whether it’s from cybersecurity attacks, physical security failures, human error, natural disaster, or some other culprit. But by deploying the latest data protection technologies, companies can safeguard their information in a cost-effective way.