Heterogeneity Isn’t Just Hard to Spell – It’s Even Harder to Support

This is my fourth excerpt from my Don’t Be a Puppet of Your Backup Strategy whitepaper. Click here to download my full whitepaper for instant gratificationIt’s free!

Virtualization is only the latest type of heterogeneity.  Three additional types of heterogeneity include having different types of computers, storage, and operating systems. Your backup strategy needs to accommodate for current heterogeneity as well as being flexible for the future growth of your information technology infrastructure.

In this post, we’re going to talk about the first type of heterogeneity – different types of computers – and save the other two options for later posts.

The edge: notebooks, PCs, and workstations

There’s a strong focus today on protecting your file and application servers, and it’s absolutely valid.  It is critically important to keep your servers’ unstructured and structured data protected.  However, a lot of your critical data sits on your employee’s notebooks, PCs, and workstations.  It is tremendously easier to create a policy that employees only keep critical data on your centralized servers and storage than it is to actually make that policy work.

A CEO of a medium-sized company once told us that if the employee kept critical data on their notebook and lost it, then it was the employee’s problem.  A few weeks later, we got a call from this CEO asking for advice.  His notebook had died and he had weeks of sensitive data on it.  He was asking what he should do.  The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him, although his data ended up being lost to him.

You can have the most powerful backup solution in the universe, but it only works if the devices that you are backing up contain the data you need to backup.  If you’re not backing up the “edge” – the notebooks, PCs, and workstations in your company that sprout like weeds – then you’re eventually going to be very, very sorry.

 

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