Backup Considerations Grow Within the SMB as the Internet of Things Grows

The IT staffs of medium-sized companies will be seeing more requests to integrate the IoT (Internet of Things) with their missions critical applications.

As stated in the article Internet Of Things: Software platforms will become the rage in 2015, “The growing scope and importance of the data from IoT will force CIOs to integrate the Internet of Things into their Business Technology agenda, with full capabilities for data management, analytics, security, and enterprise application integration.”

Internet of ThingsSo, what is the Internet of Things? First, let’s understand that there is a growing trend in the use of sensors in cars, traffic lights, water meters, and much more. When these devices connect to the Internet to transfer their data to monitoring applications, business applications, or to other devices, this environment becomes the Internet of Things. Other data contributing to the environment is the data from Social Media activity and other applications not in the category of typical core business applications.

It is important to understand that it is the data being transferred over the Internet that makes the Internet of Things (IoT). If these devices or applications remained in communication with only their own platform, they would not be part of IoT.

The trend is that there is a need for the data from these devices and applications to be made available to business applications for increased corporate value. Businesses are integrating these specialized devices and applications with core business processes for analytics and advanced business processing. This data has now become corporate data.

The result is more complex data types within the corporate business data environment. Central backup procedures must be reviewed by IT for proper governance and assurance of data resiliency. This data is now mission critical and must be treated as legacy business data, such as Accounting, Payroll, etc. This provides an additional burden on the IT staff in understanding the implications of developing backup procedures for these diverse data types.

For assistance in reviewing your backup procedure, you can contact Salvus Data, a data backup and recovery MSP specializing in Tivoli Storage Manager.

Archival Data Storage Cannot Be Left Forgotten and Still Remain Resilient

Data must be resilient. And Data Resilience is from being able to to go back to any point in time and selectively recover.

As stated in Building a better archival storage strategy “Data that’s no longer referenced with any frequency tends to fall off the radar. The only concern is that it not be deleted, because that could have devastating consequences.”.

Data RecoveryIt is not good enough that data is just not deleted. There are real life situations that require the ability to “look back in time”. Data backup and recovery strategies must meet company policies regarding regulatory requirements, data breaches, ability to respond to court orders, and more.

Consider that data is not only to be backed up for protection of a catastrophic event, but, it also needs to be restored in different ways for different purposes and meet varying requirements. This requires coordinated strategies and testing. Data Backup strategies must be planned and tested to assure all company requirements regarding data retention and recovery are met.

Salvus Data Consultants is a managed service provider that can assist in evaluating your data backup and recovery processes to ensure that all scenarios are considered to ensure your data is resilient, not just backed up. Then Salvus can manage your entire backup and recovery processes remotely without your data ever leaving your control.

Tivoli Storage Manager V7.1 Supports VMware Full Virtual Machine Instant Access and Recovery

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is an enterprise class backup and archiving application. These types of products protect against data loss and enable the ability to recover data for adherence to industry compliance standards and court orders.

TSM is continuing to improve in its capabilities. As stated in the IBM announcement letter for TSM V7.1:  “With the new release of TSM V7.1,  A single Tivoli Storage Manager server improves scalability with up to ten timesenterpise data improvement for daily ingest of deduplicated and replicated data over previously published rates, and new reference architectures optimized for data deduplication.”

That announcement letter goes on to say Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments V7.1 helps to improve backup and recovery management for VMware environments with the following new features:

Tivoli Storage Manager can be configured to meet an organization’s specific requirements. For those organizations that have IT staff dedicated to mission-critical enterprise applications and are not heavily trained in the complex discipline of enterprise data backup and recovery, the administration of TSM can be remotely managed by data backup and recovery consultants. Salvus Data Consultants is one of the leading TSM integrators offering a range of backup solutions and services to store & protect your valuable information.

Salvus Data Consultants manages their customer’s TSM environment remotely while the customer maintains total control of their data. For more information about the new release of TSM and its capabilities, contact Salvus Data.

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