Embracing the new frontier of backup solutions

No company is ever truly finished with a Digital Transformation – it’s difficult to fully harness the power of new digital technologies to maximize benefits across every aspect of a business. Change managers and IT leaders are continually asking the same questions, no matter how far along the transformation journey their organizations have come: How do we stay focused on accelerating business outcomes? How can we become more agile than our competitors? How can we bring value to our customers more efficiently?

Moving to the cloud is often touted as the key to Digital Transformation. Indeed, it provides a way to host and consume services in a way that supports the vision of business transformation.

But even after moving operations to the cloud, many companies still are not seeing their dreams of operational agility come true. That’s partly because the key to business acceleration lies in moving several gears at once, not just one. Unlocking the full potential of the cloud world means focusing on people and processes in addition to the cloud technology that fuels growth and innovation. Let’s dig into why your organization must embrace the new frontier of backup solutions.

Cloud computing requires a transformational journey and data protection

Just as moving to a more agile, digital business is a constant journey, learning how to get the best out of cloud computing is a journey, too. People-heavy solutions and complex processes don’t fulfill the change agenda – nor do they fulfill expectations of what life will be like after moving to the cloud.

Answers to the initial questions raised above surrounding business outcomes, competitiveness, and efficiency in delivering value can be found by zooming out – beyond cloud technology – and viewing the organization from a systems perspective. For real change to take effect, leaders must understand the need to evolve and drive changes across the systems and solutions the company uses, and the products they deliver to their end customers.

That means reducing the load for technical teams who support their digital solutions, as they make change possible. To help them enable organization-wide transformation, IT teams need tools that facilitate fast deployments and a more stable infrastructure. But most of all, they need their cloud providers to do more. In short, by moving to the cloud, leaders expect to have fewer digital assets for their internal team to manage, allowing them to receive support for other areas of the Digital Transformation agenda. However, this will not be the case right away. First, organizations will have to determine where their teams and processes must evolve to maximize the value of their new cloud deployments.

Value is delivered when cloud backup management is simplified

Relying on technical skills, tools, and operational processes to manage your cloud infrastructure isn’t simplifying anything – it’s those dependencies that bog down agility initiatives.

To deliver day-to-day value, leverage the ideology of the cloud and think in terms of centralization, speed, and efficiency – which is precisely what you get with a managed backup system. It brings everything together under a single dashboard, where innovative technologies and forward-thinking processes like automation can be used to back up live systems as often as required.

That means leaders and managers can keep their change initiatives moving forward with consistently reliable systems. Cloud-enabled collaboration, data collection, fast and flexible recovery options, and faster time to value – all are ingredients for Digital Transformation in a cloud-based world. With unified managed backup, critical data and assets are continually protected from security threats, uncertain backup processes, and unsustainable costs. It fits within the mindset of digital change, one where everyone is vested in the narrative of holistic protection across an organization’s digital assets. Here’s an idea of what that might look like:

• Virtual machines are backed up in near real-time
• Containers are backed up on demand
• SaaS Application protection of data in newly acquired solutions
• Endpoint backup to support remote work
• Activity is captured in near real time for other app delivery mechanisms
• Data is recovered and used in a reasonable amount of time
• Recovery metrics look strong
• Teams can respond almost instantly to problems and restore business operations in moments instead of days
• Architecture inefficiencies can be spotted
• Data protection is simplified by one portal that covers all the niche backup solutions a company has amassed

BackupSimple aligns the cloud journey with the digital transformation agenda

A major tenet of successful Digital Transformation is that every component of a process should deliver business value. BackupSimple powered by Metallic is a unified management solution that comes closer than any other when it comes to ensuring operational viability without having to worry about a complex patchwork of backup solutions.

The managed data backup provided by BackupSimple powered by Metallic doesn’t require a large investment in infrastructure and other initial expenses. That gives smaller and mid-sized businesses a valuable leg up in their transformational journey, as well as to compete with larger organizations. And that, in turn, can have a transformational impact on the concept of the backup, which comes to be viewed as something that delivers business value.