Multi-Cloud Data Management with Cisco and Veeam

According to a 2018 report by TechTarget, by the end of 2019 nearly 81% of enterprises will have adopted a multi-cloud strategy, and for good reason. By leveraging multiple cloud provider services, organizations are able to piece together best-of-breed solutions at the lowest possible cost.
That’s just one advantage. This approach also allows organizations to improve their overall flexibility and scalability, while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Despite its increasing popularity, though, multi-cloud adoption is not without its challenges.
Most of the discussion pertaining to the challenges of operating multi-cloud environments seems to revolve around problems with getting services to work across clouds, or the difficulties incurred in trying to ensure adherence to SLAs. These same hurdles have also historically impacted the ability to effectively protect data in a multi-cloud environment.
Not surprisingly, it can be extraordinarily difficult to ensure comprehensive data protection for data moving into and between clouds. Furthermore, there tends to be a general lack of confidence among IT professionals when it comes to their ability to meet SLAs for data recovery, regardless of where the data resides.
Veeam has recently partnered with Cisco to introduce an industry-leading data protection solution that allows enterprise organizations to protect their data, irrespective of its location. Through this strategic partnership, Veeam’s Availability Suite is now available on Cisco’s HyperFlex line of hyperconverged systems.

Protect Any App, Any Data, on Any Cloud

One of the longstanding best practices for data protection is the “3-2-1 Rule.” It states that an organization should have at least three copies of its data, on two different media types, with one copy residing offsite. When placed under the lens of today’s multi-cloud environments, the rule’s offsite requirement might be expressed as “don’t store your data and your backup on the same cloud”. Maintaining a data backup on a separate cloud provides protection against a cloud level data loss event.
Historically, cross-cloud backups have been difficult and somewhat problematic to implement. The scope of the challenge increases exponentially if an organization also wants to achieve cloud-based disaster recovery.
Veeam and Cisco have directly addressed these challenges by making it possible to protect all an organization’s data and application while leveraging any cloud.

Complete Visibility Into the Data Protection Environment

Veeam delivers complete visibility across an organization’s entire environment, regardless of where the protected resources reside. Veeam ONE provides a single pain of glass oversight into the protection of physical, virtual, and cloud-based resources. This allows customers to further reduce their risks by making it easy for them to verify that their applications and data are being protected.
In addition, Veeam performs proactive monitoring and alerting across the entire enterprise. This capability goes far beyond the mere tracking of backup jobs; Veeam is able to provide real-time performance and availability monitoring of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The Veeam software also includes capacity planning capabilities and allows backup administrators to experiment with various “what if” scenarios.
Veeam provides even more insight through the Veeam Explorer tool. Veeam offers unique native snapshot integration with the HyperFlex platform, and with Veeam Explorer, leverages existing snapshot capabilities to recover individual files, or even entire VMs, from storage snapshots in minutes—all without staging or intermediate steps.

Use Consistent Data Protection Policies

One of the most difficult things about working in a multi-cloud environment is that each cloud service provider has its own way of doing things. The Amazon Web Services portal, for example, is vastly different from the Microsoft Azure portal. A similar problem has long plagued organizations who need to protect data in multi-cloud environments.
Early on, organizations often found that they required one data protection solution for their on-premises resources, and a host of different solutions for protecting resources residing in the cloud. As time went on, some vendors began supporting cloud and on-premises environments through a single product. Even so, there was often a “cloud way of doing things” that was vastly different from the way data protection was managed in the local data center.
In stark contrast, Veeam and Cisco have designed their data protection solution to be completely seamless. Data protection policies behave in a consistent manner, regardless of whether the protected resources reside on-premises or in the public cloud.

A Confidence Builder

Cisco and Veeam can help enterprise customers to feel more confident in their ability to protect data in multi-cloud environments, while also adhering to mandated SLAs. In fact, 96% of Veeam recoveries are completed within RTO SLAs, as compared to 78% for other solutions.
Additionally, 83% of Veeam customers are more confident in their backups then they were with their previous vendor. These statistics point to the fact that Cisco and Veeam help customers manage risks, while also improving their overall flexibility and reliability across multiple cloud services.
Best of all, Cisco and Veeam allow customers to leverage their existing management tools, ensuring hassle-free management.