By Alasdair Parsonson, Technical Expert: Data Intelligence Hitachi Vantara

The world is changing faster than ever, and most organizations are struggling to keep up. Data has become the lifeblood of the modern digital business. It is captured from external ecosystems of partners, customers, and devices, flowing into an organization where analytics and intelligence are used to derive insights and support decision making.

These insights, when applied to business operations, in turn generate more data, and the cycle starts over again. Modern data environments have become very complex; data is no longer in a mainframe or a relational database in neatly structured rows and columns; rather, it is distributed across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Data protection can be complicated

In the modern enterprise, the data protection (also known as backup and recovery) infrastructure has been cobbled together over time, adding features and point solutions as new needs arise. If these issues have resulted in a cost or management nightmare at your organization, it is time to design and adopt a simpler approach.

There are many things that can happen that affect the availability and usability of your data. Losing data can have a profound impact on your business, depending on the importance of the data, the volume of the data, and the time or money it takes to recreate the data (if that is even possible).

Integrated solutions for modern data protection

With Hitachi’s Data Instance Director (HDID) and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) you can repurpose your backup data to reduce the time and effort to create redundant copies, and to reduce the costs of storing copies.

HDID is the automation and orchestration software that simplifies the ability to achieve demanding service levels for operational recovery, business continuity, disaster recovery and data repurposing. This is done by brining together a suite of host-based and automated storage-based copy technologies to achieve end-to-end protection in a single workflow.

Hitachi Thin Image creates space-efficient, pinpoint time copies of protected volumes while Hitachi ShadowImage creates full copy clones of the protected. Both local replication technologies have no impact on production performance and are part of the Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) available in all Hitachi VSP systems.

HCP is a highly scalable object storage solution that enables IT organizations and cloud service providers to store, share, sync, protect, preserve, analyse and retrieve file data from a single system. HDID backs up file system data to HCP in a native format.a

These basic data protections can be considered little more than an insurance policy. Like an automobile or homeowners’ policy, it is a cost to the organization that doesn’t add any value at the top line. It does, however, offer value to the bottom line when something bad happens. You don’t know what that bad thing might be, so you need to protect against a wide range of threats.

Each data asset, application or system requires slightly different technologies and processes to protect it against each different threat. Using HDID and HCP can ensure that critical application availability meets business service level requirements, now and in the future.