Automated Provisioning to Increase IT Resilience and Efficiency

IT professionals are heroes, doing whatever it takes to ensure that the infrastructure that helps keep their business running is available 24 x 7 x 365. Automated provisioning, introduced in Unitrends Backup Software version 10,  is designed to address this challenge – increase IT resilience and IT efficiency in an automated and orchestrated manner, such that IT professionals can sleep well at night knowing that their infrastructure is protected. And in the event of a disruption, business continuity is guaranteed within their compliance policies.

Any downtime in business operations due to an infrastructure disruption can be catastrophic to the business. IT professionals innately understand this responsibility. In addition, IT professionals are constantly seeking opportunities to increase their efficiency to support their customers – both internal and external.  For most organizations, where IT professionals are overworked and are under resource constraints, this balance of ensuring IT resilience and increasing efficiency is a daunting task.

Before we jump into the details of the feature, let’s take a look at the problems that impact increasing IT resilience and efficiency today:

  1. Data growth and complexity: Data is growing at an exponential rate. And so is complexity within the enterprise.  However the growth in the number of IT professionals to handle this growth and complexity is disproportionate. This disparity has led to dangerous gaps in backup and continuity protection as well as a lack of agility and nimbleness amid an overworked and under-budgeted IT staff.
  2. Confidence in recovery is plummeting: Given the complexity of enterprise workloads, less than 2% of businesses feel confident that they can recover their business operations in the event of a disruption within 1 hour. This drop in confidence is typically attributed to the manual (hence error prone) recovery processes.
  3. Efficiency at the cost of infrastructure: IT organizations are embarking on the tight coupling of development and operations (DevOps) to increase efficiency and deliver solutions in a predictable and nimble manner. In addition, other business functions like compliance testing, software patch management and application life cycle management all require provisioning of resources. Resources that organizations often cannot provide at scale. This leads to these business functions being implemented on production workloads, impacting the performance of the infrastructure and increasing the risk of disruption while validating these business function.For example, when vendors deliver software patches that must be applied across the entire infrastructure,  the patch must be tested in an isolated environment to ensure that it does not inadvertently cause a disruption during roll out.

Automated Provisioning in v10 helps address these challenges.

Automated provisioning allows IT administrators to access a consistent point in time snapshot of production data, that is always accessible and kept refreshed as changes occur within the production. Unitrends leverages its global deduplication to ensure that a single copy of the production data is available and accessible at all times without any additional overhead of storage consumption to preserve multiple copies.

Key features of automated provisioning are:

  1. Automated and orchestrated Recovery Assurance of physical and virtual workloads: With automated provisioning, users can create Data Copy Access jobs for automated and orchestrated recovery testing to ensure that their infrastructure can be recovered within their RPO and RTO requirements. Data Copy Access can be interleaved between physical and virtual machine recovery orchestration, providing comprehensive automation of recovery testing. In addition, most n-tiered applications, have specific dependencies on services, that must be made available in a particular order.This is known as recovery sequencing and Data Copy Access jobs allow configuration of boot order groups to ensure that the dependencies within the infrastructure are maintained and automated for recovery. But, just ensuring the machines boot is not sufficient to ensure comprehensive recovery assurance. Customers can provide custom scripts to validate application availability or use one or more of the hundred default scripts to ensure application availability during recovery testing.  A compliance report that compares Recover Point Actuals and Recovery Time Actuals against goal, provides the confidence that IT administrators need to know that their infrastructure can and will be recovered within their RPO/RTO goals.In the event of a disaster, failover of data to the production environment is a single click. Recovery does not get simpler than this.Here is a sneak peek of the feature: 
    Increase IT Resilience and Efficiency
    Creation of a job

     

    Job details
    Job details

     

    Compliance report
    Compliance report


    Increase IT resilience

  1. Instant Labs to increase IT efficiency: Data Copy Access (with all the automation described above) jobs can provision an instant lab at any point in time that allows IT professionals to access an isolated copy of production data, right from the Unitrends backup appliance. Since key business functions can now be tested in an automated manner, without impacting the production environment,  IT professionals can leverage their backup data for the following use cases:
    1. Patch management and validation
    2. Security testing
    3. DevOps
    4. Compliance and risk management and adherence
    5. Reporting and analytics

Be the First to See Unitrends Backup Version 10

V10 dramatically enhances the capabilities of Unitrends Backup, bringing unprecedented productivity and compliance to the modern enterprise.

With V10, you can do more with less, faster.

Sign up for the demo to be the first to get access to Unitrends Backup V10.

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