When disaster strikes, citizens turn to state and local government agencies for emergency services and the latest information about power outages, evacuations and travel alerts. Access to agency personnel and resources is critical to the safety of family, friends and co-workers. If an agency’s network goes down and communication channels and online resources aren’t available, the consequences could be catastrophic.
That’s why it’s especially important for agencies to be prepared for disaster with a reliable, offsite backup solution. Floods, heavy winds, blizzards, fires, cyber attacks and other disasters can not only make physical locations unsafe, but they can also knock out servers and other data center equipment and cause service disruptions when citizens need them most. Of course, if you keep backups onsite, you run the risk of having your backup files destroyed along with the primary data.
Drawbacks of Traditional Offsite Backup Solutions
Offsite backup is a time-honored way of protecting against a site disaster. If a government agency’s physical buildings and facilities are damaged, backups remain safe in a remote location. Data and applications can then be recovered to allow agencies to resume normal operations.
Traditionally, offsite backup meant copying data to tape or disk and physically transporting that media to another location for storage. This process is too slow, labor-intensive and expensive for today’s IT environment, where data must be backed up frequently and restored quickly when needed.
Today, many organizations use the WAN to back up data in the cloud. Software automates the backup process through a high-bandwidth Internet connection, and the offsite backup is managed and maintained by the cloud service provider. The downside is that restoring data from the cloud over an Internet connection can be excruciatingly slow, especially if you need to recover a large amount of data.
Advantages of Hybrid Cloud Backup
State and local government agencies can benefit from hybrid cloud backup, which combines local backup media with replication to the cloud to protect against a site disaster. Local backups ensure that you can restore data quickly for day-to-day operational requirements. You also have on-demand access to backups in the cloud, and those resources can be scaled to support ever-increasing data volumes.
The Dell EMC Data Protection Suite allows you to combine industry-leading backup storage from Dell Technologies with public, private or hybrid cloud storage. Data Protection Suite can leverage cost-efficient cloud object storage for long-term backup retention and rapid recovery, with a consistent user interface across the backup environment. Built-in de-duplication optimizes storage resources on-premises, reduces bandwidth requirements and keeps cloud costs under control.
This comprehensive, software-defined solution is ideal for environments with a variety of applications and storage platforms. Flexible deployment options allow you to precisely match the data protection requirements of each workload and use case. Native backup and recovery features and policy-based automation simplify operations and help ensure all applications are protected. Proactive monitoring and alerting help ensure adherence to policies and service levels.
Reliable, efficient offsite backup is an absolute must for state and local government agencies. Let us show you how hybrid cloud backup with Dell EMC Data Protection Suite helps ensure employees and citizens have access to the resources they need when disaster strikes.
