Previous blogs in this six-part series covered the savings, scalability, security, and simplicity inherent to cloud-native solutions and different data-protection architectures commonly found in today’s fast-changing cloud environment. This blog looks at how rich metadata can make cloud-native data protection apps particularly effective.
With cloud data protection and management, a SaaS data protection provider can collect and consolidate data from all an enterprise’s sources. These typically include file servers, virtual machines, mobile endpoints, and cloud workloads from SaaS apps like Office 365 and PaaS apps like Oracle. But it’s not just about the data. In addition to native file metadata, the app can create its own enhanced metadata, such as time-indexing, for each file and maintain a “master” metadata database in the cloud.
Enhanced metadata plays diverse roles in enhancing your cloud data protection solution:
- Ransomware and other malware is a major risk to enterprise data. Cloud data centers are air-gapped to prevent infection from enterprise networks, and with pristine backups that include time-indexed metadata, a data protection app can make recovery fast and easy — eliminating any temptation to pay a ransom.
- Backups may need to be stored in different cloud data centers. For example, government data may need to reside in a FedRamp-authorized facility and other data may have residency restrictions to meet GDPR and eDiscovery requirements. Metadata can help guide where data is stored.
- Time-indexing also enables leveraging tiered storage pricing. Recent data can be stored in the highest-availability tier, and as it ages, it can automatically move to less-expensive lower-availability tiers.
- Rich metadata unlocks the value of enterprise data. It enables faster and more comprehensive analytics to gain critical insights, uncover opportunities, and expedite decision making.
- Corporate users typically keep identical copies of the same data, with the same files duplicated on hundreds and sometimes thousands of endpoints worldwide. Using rich metadata for global deduplication ensures that only one copy is backed up, reducing data volume up to 80 percent. An added benefit is significantly reducing bandwidth usage during backups, lessening any impact on users.
Apart from extending metadata, a cloud-native data protection solution such as Druva can also automatically perform full-text indexing to speed eDiscovery and improve compliance and governance. Druva is a flexible, cloud-native solution that offers cloud backup and disaster recovery across endpoints, data center, and cloud workloads — without requiring any dedicated hardware, software, or skilled resources. In addition, Druva Cloud Platform is built on AWS, making it secure, infinitely scalable, and globally accessible.
Check out blogs #1 and #2 in this series: Why Enterprises are Turning to the Cloud for Data Protection and Management and Deployment Options for Your Cloud Data Protection. Our next one will post soon.
For more detail about why the cloud is the place for enterprise data protection and management, download the Cloud Data Protection for Dummies book and our ClO’s Guide to Cloud-first Data Protection.