Data has been and always will be an integral part of an organization. The volume of data is increasing daily and is getting out of control. Backing it all up is also a hassle. Administrators have to manage terabytes to petabytes of data, and administrators are usually playing catch up to manage and handle all this data.
Luckily, there are some practices that an IT professional or administrator can follow to handle all the backup data is an efficient way.
- Identify the requirements for data protection
Managing a huge amount of enterprise critical data is no way an easy job to do. The IT administrator would have to determine which set of data is being backed up and who owns it and where is it exactly coming from.
- Data Storage Solution
The IT administrator will most likely sit with the necessary stakeholders in order to determine the data protection requirements for each of the workloads. This will include evaluating each workload’s backup retention requirements so that it’s future goal can be anticipated and therefore, it’s long term captivity can be determined.
This is a basic requirement as it is impossible to gain control over a large set of data without knowing the protection requirements and potential growth. And of course, determining exactly how long you need to retain your data in the system. Veeam backup to azure can be used for cloud backups.
- Observe the current backup architecture being used
This is also an important step. Before you make any changes, it is best to examine and study the current backup jobs which are in place in order to discover some inefficiencies, if any. There is no need to setup same or same type of backup jobs over and over again over a short period of time.
- Backup Storage
Overlapping backup jobs is very common and it is likely that you will find a few. These, if found, contribute greatly in a rapid backup growth as you will be backing up the same data, over and over again. It will create a huge chunk of unnecessary data.
During this process, an IT administrator may even discover some incorrectly configured jobs
which are another cause of a growth in backup.
Now you must be wondering what is an incorrect backup job? Well, it doesn’t necessarily mean a job that is at fault. It means that a backup job which is backing up data inefficiently.
For instance, backing up data again and again which initially does not require backing up daily or hourly can stack up your data to be backed up. Any job or data which does not need backing up that frequently should be adjusted or scheduled accordingly.
If the IT administrator is creating a jobs or processes, it is essential that it complies to the existing SLA and also make sure that the organization is using deduplication in its process so that the size of backup data is reduced.
Deduplication refers to eliminating a redundant set of data so that it may not be backed up in every backup job. Veeam backup and replication appliance can be used in this case.
- Create a data lifecycle management policy
This is the final step of the whole process. After establishing and going through the whole process, the IT administrators can begin developing data lifecycle management policies for the organization’s backup data.
A data management policy usually involves how much data should be backed up in a backup job and how for long should it be retained. Retaining all your data, since the beginning of time, just for the sake of it, will only populate your backup jobs even more and will cost excessive storage. It is important to set up a retention period for your backup data and figure out exactly what needs to be backed up and retained and for how long. Backup and disaster recovery is a vital mechanism in business continuity.
This will ensure that the data backup sets are kept to a manageable size and also ensures that the data is retained only for a required period of time, not more, not less.
This will result in shorter backup data sets and will make the life of the IT administrators a lot easier as they would not have to manage the unnecessary huge amounts of backup data to manage anymore.
Conclusion
Organizations deal with terabytes to petabytes of data every day and managing all that data can be troublesome. By configuring the backup structure and creating a better management lifecycle, can make it a lot easier for the organization and IT admins to manage the backup data in a more efficient and cost-effective way, which would result in smaller backup data sets and consume less storage, which in return will save storage costs and bandwidth.
