Data protection matters! Every business requires data to run effectively. Product and service data, customer data, partner data, and even competitor data all inform your strategy and feed into your infrastructure of processes.

Without big data from mobile devices, building sensors, the growing Internet of Things, and a host of other sources it’s difficult to strategize effectively. But data is also the little things required for the day-to-day running of your company, like the alarm code, supplier addresses, and phone numbers, or the login details for your software systems.

Data is so vital that it can be described as business DNA. It enables your organization to survive and grow. But it’s only when you can’t lay your hands on that data, that its true worth is revealed.

Catastrophic data loss

No business wants to believe it can happen to them, but data breaches are common and can prove incredibly costly. With an average cost of $141 per data record, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, the total cost of breaches can quickly run into the millions.

In the immediate aftermath of a data loss or theft, organizations focus on getting up and running again as quickly as possible. Downtime brings everything to a halt, making customers anxious and partners angry.

Punitive fines for failing to adhere to regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can be very high. It’s also vital to close whatever loophole allowed your data to be exfiltrated before you can work on repairing damaged relationships and reputations.

Obscured by cloud

While the drive to be innovative and agile has driven widespread cloud adoption, the pursuit of new cloud services and tools has often fallen outside the purview of beleaguered IT departments. Shadow IT is a very real security concern because all too often the due care and attention required to protect company data have fallen by the wayside in the rush to realize an edge.

Failing to take the potential pitfalls of cloud data management into account can spell disaster. Data must be highly available and fully recoverable if you want to get your business back on track after an incident.

Placing blind trust in cloud vendors is a mistake you’ll only make once.

Lay the groundwork for a swift recovery

The longer your network and systems are down the more money you lose. If you lack storage snapshots that can be rapidly cloned or even recent backups that can be restored, your business will permanently lose data. Even if you locate an older backup the information will be out of date. Login details may have changed, configurations will be different, and some business accounts could be lost forever.

Do you have a plan in place to cater for an irrecoverable data loss? Consider the potential expense. Even if it transpires that a third party was to blame, which is often the case, your business will still be on the hook with customers and regulatory bodies. Ultimately, your business will pay the price and if it’s too high, you may not survive.

Don’t be short-sighted, get regular backups in place, and protect your business data properly.

For a more in-depth look, please see Network World’s “Skimping on business data protection could be a costly mistake.”

Read this post by Buurst SoftNAS CEO & Founder ”Rick Braddy” to learn 7 essential strategies for effective cloud data management.

Cloud migration can be a tricky business. Without careful planning, things can and do go wrong. If you’re in too much of a rush, then you’re liable to skip important steps.

“Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault,” according to Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner.

Here are 7 strategies you must formulate for data management success.

Data protection

You must ensure that all company data is fully protected and safe from intruders or catastrophes, whether it’s on your local servers, in a data warehouse somewhere, or on a remote device. Be prepared for ransomware, accidental deletions, and corruption. Without a robust, fully tested data protection strategy that extends to your partners, you could lose crucial data, and an apology or refund will not be enough.

Data security

Do you understand precisely where your data is or how your cloud providers are storing it? Comingling is common practice. If you want to ensure that regulations are adhered to, then you need to check that your data is separate with stringent access controls that include proper user authentication measures. Many popular cloud services lack granular controls.

Rapid data recovery

When data problems strike, you must be able to get up and running again as quickly as possible, because downtime is money lost. Think about storage snapshots and version rollback. Don’t rely solely on current backups for the data and apps that are most important to your business operations.

Data performance

What happens when the network buckles under the weight of too many simultaneous requests, or your cloud provider has a hardware failure? Latency issues and lethargic performance are going to impact your apps and customers. You need some control over performance, so you can make changes to ensure response times meet user expectations as demand grows.

Data availability

Failures are inevitable from time to time. There will be mistakes and unforeseen problems, but how we deal with them can make all the difference. Replicate your most valuable data and establish a failsafe, so you can seamlessly switch to it when you need to. Ask for an SLA from your provider that guarantees data availability.

Multi-cloud interoperability

In the race to boost efficiency and cut costs, most businesses have a multi-cloud environment. In fact, Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid infrastructure by 2020. Don’t get stuck with proprietary APIs and services. Keep your options open, think about how easy it will be to change vendors in the future, and protect your flexibility.

Disaster recovery

Whether one of your developers makes a mistake with a code commit, or one of your cloud providers is breached, there are times when your data may be compromised and even your backups may be exposed and unrecoverable. Maintain an offsite copy of everything you require to get the infrastructure back up and running and you can reduce a major disaster to a minor one.

Under pressure to scale up and get immediate results without spending big, some companies will inevitably take shortcuts. But, if you properly assess the risk and potential costs long term, you’ll understand why it’s worth taking your time to draw up comprehensive, robust strategies for data management.

For more information, be sure to read my article in Network World, “7 common cloud data management pitfalls to avoid.”

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Recently, SoftNAS® joined the Veeam Alliance Partner Program to help joint customers optimize their cloud backups, restore and disaster recovery capabilities by effectively leveraging the public cloud. The solution offers a unique combination of performance and cost efficiency for off-site cloud backups.

As more businesses recognize the importance of a viable disaster recovery plan, public cloud platforms have quickly emerged as a great option for storing backups. Not only do businesses today contend with environmental events (e.g. hurricanes, fires) and malware, there is also a demand for data to be available 24×7. These factors prove how important it is for a business to have a copy of their data off-site.

Businesses that have embraced off-site backup and availability benefit by being better prepared to proactively respond to these threats. Implementing modern data protection means evaluating and potentially even investing in new capabilities to maintain business continuity. In today’s world, this could mean the difference between future prosperity and a business-impacting failure.

Cloud storage is a viable option because it:

• Is physically isolated in separate location.
• Is elastic and scalable based upon the needs of the business with minimal CAPEX investment.
• Provides a DR hosting environment for restoring applications.

In a Q4 2017 research survey by the Taneja Group, 41% of customers planned to leverage public clouds for backups.[1] The 2017 Veeam Availability Report provides similar results as 48% of customers surveyed reported investments or planned investments in the next twelve months in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and over 50% in Backup as a Service (BaaS).[2]

Veeam Backup & Replication provides businesses the ability to easily and quickly recover data, extending far beyond simply copying data to a secondary location. The ability to create multiple restore points via the Veeam synthetic merges or incremental backups provides customers the ability to select the restore point. To best leverage these advanced capabilities, an investment in a high-performance storage system to process reads and writes effectively may be required. Businesses may feel the need to invest in a robust block-based NAS storage system requiring a significant upfront capital investment.

While backing up data is the primary objective, it is also important to consider the size of the backup window. Throughput is a necessary consideration for backup job completion, requiring the appropriate resources.

A common misconception is that, to achieve cost savings there must be a trade-off in performance. A conventional option for affordable off-site backups are tape archives or VTL alternatives. While this may satisfy an audit requirement and require less initial CAPEX investment, when the need to hastily recover data occurs, tape may not be the most compelling option. Restoring applications via tape can be slow and recovering from multiple restore points can be problematic. Public clouds are a viable option to maintain backups off-site, offering the business the opportunity to quickly recover via multiple restore points and maintain availability. In the event of a physical on-premises failure, cloud-based DR provides a means of restoring applications and data to a VM instance in the cloud, further enhancing restore capabilities.

Buurst SoftNAS Solution for Cloud Backups

Buurst SoftNAS Essentials provides a great solution for customers that desire a more modern approach to offsite backup. By leveraging object-based data stores (e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 or Azure Block Blob) your business can leverage inexpensive and scalable storage in the public cloud. When leveraging object storage, you may assume you must cope with native object API interfaces instead of native NAS protocols like NFS or CIFS. You may also assume performance may be impacted with object storage. SoftNAS helps customers overcome these obstacles by presenting an NFS interface. SoftNAS patent pending ObjFast™ technology enhances object storage so customers can expect performance metrics associated with block storage. This increases cost efficiency and performance while leveraging the benefits of the public cloud. The result is improved DR with the RTO/RPO benefits you receive from an on-premises storage alternative.

Summary

As a Veeam partner and customer, the solution we’ve created is exactly what we’ve been looking for to back-up our own infrastructure. Alternatives such as cloud gateways were deemed too slow and unreliable for our needs. We wanted a cost-effective option that performed well when leveraging synthetic merges. We now leverage this combined solution for backup jobs via a VPN connected to an NFS share presented by SoftNAS Essentials™ running in the cloud with an object data store back end.

Just like us, we think you will greatly appreciate these benefits:

• Improved recovery times (RTOs), flexible RPO settings, and faster restore times than tape or VTL alternatives.
• Near block storage performance using the SoftNAS ObjFast™ technology tuned specifically for Veeam backup jobs (e.g. full and synthetic full).
• Lower total cost of ownership leveraging object storage instead of cloud block storage.
• Fast, flexible and reliable recovery of your applications and data to help you meet your SLA requirements.

Next Steps

Learn more about cloud-based enterprise architecture options at www.SoftNAS.com. We have years of experience helping customers make this transition quickly and easily. We understand you may have questions and we’d be pleased to help you make a successful transition to the cloud. SoftNAS is used by thousands of organizations around the world to protect their data in the cloud, achieve a 100% up-time SLA for business-critical applications and move applications, data and workloads into the cloud with confidence.

You can get started with SoftNAS on Azure or AWS in multiple ways:

1. Take a Free Azure Test Drive: Get started in under two minutes using the Azure Test Drive. This option allows you to quickly try SoftNAS without having to install or configure anything. The SoftNAS instance loads automatically, connects the Azure storage account and pre-provisions multiple storage volumes/LUN using NFS, CIFS/SMB, AFP and iSCSI. No Credit card or Azure Subscription required but the environment is available for 1 hour from the time you enter the test drive.
2. Try out SoftNAS for free on Azure.
3. Try out SoftNAS for free on AWS.
   Both trials allow you to install, configure and use SoftNAS as if you were running in a production environment and explore the product for multiple weeks.
4. Purchase: You can purchase SoftNAS on the Azure or AWS Marketplaces. We offer various capacities and performance levels for fast time to production. Discounted larger deployments up to many petabytes, are available via a BYOL (Bring Your Own License) obtained by contacting the SoftNAS Sales team or an authorized reselling partner.

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How can you leverage the cloud to manage the costs of your Isilon data while you grow?

You have decided to move some of your applications and data to the cloud.  You’ve started up a new instance in the cloud with your business application running on it.  Great, but now you need to Lift existing data from your data center and Shift it to the cloud for the application to access.

Lift and Shift solution

Trying to create a “build your own” Lift and Shift solution can be challenging with a number of questions to consider:

• Do you have a high-speed network connection with low latency to efficiently transfer the data over the network to the cloud?
• Is your new application compatible with the type of storage you want to use in the cloud?
• Do you have an automated solution to help you manage the migration of the data to the cloud and keep it synchronized as your live data changes?

Why not consider a solution that is already up to the challenge of handling the task of Lifting and Shifting your data to the cloud?

It may be time to give SoftNAS Platinum Beta Lift and Shift feature a try and see how SoftNAS can help.

(For more information on the SoftNAS Platinum Beta, click here.)

The Lift and Shift feature is presented as an easy-to-use wizard UI in SoftNAS StorageCenter that allows you to select what data you want to migrate to the cloud, the type of cloud storage to use, the ability to pause and resume the data flow so you don’t consume valuable network bandwidth during peak business hours with the option for continuous synchronization that will discover and send updated and new files to the cloud in a few easy steps:

The wizard will build a FlexFiles™ NiFi flow for you to orchestrate the migration of your data to the cloud.

Once you have completed your configuration using the wizard and your configuration has passed all the automated pre-checks, you can simply start the Lift and Shift flow and your data will start to be lifted from your source storage and shifted to the cloud.

Your data will be saved to the #1 selling enterprise cloud NAS onto the selected cloud storage that meets your application’s performance requirements.

You have the option to test your new cloud application with “real” data that has been lifted and shifted to the cloud using a SoftNAS SnapReplicate™ copy of your shifted data.   With Continuous Replication configuration, you can have a new copy of your live data for testing every day.

And when you are ready to decommission your old premise-based application and cut over to the new application in the cloud, you can stop the Lift and Shift flow knowing that the latest copy of your data is now up to date in the cloud for the new application to access.

About SoftNAS Lift and Shift Solution

SoftNAS’ Lift and Shift™ File Migration is a key feature of SoftNAS®, enabling users to migrate data from one platform to another, whether from on-premise to cloud, or between different cloud providers, while maintaining continuous synchronization. SoftNAS® is a Cloud Data orchestration product, focusing on simplifying pain points within the marketplace.

As businesses continue to look for ways to increase efficiency and improve their bottom line, more and more look to the cloud. With increased flexibility, and the ability to cut out the high cost of hardware and hardware maintenance, the cloud is seen as the solution of the future, even while many are uncertain how to implement it. SoftNAS hopes to make navigating the cloud a great deal easier, so that organizations can leverage the simplified business continuity strategies, and reduce infrastructure, maintenance, and service costs, without requiring advanced software and platform training.

Lift and Shift™ is designed to help our users quickly and easily ‘lift’ data from their on-premise storage or current cloud provider, and ‘shift’ the data seamlessly to its new cloud location while maintaining synchronization. It provides a wizard to migrate on-premises file data to the public cloud. Point SoftNAS® to existing NAS storage volumes, select your public cloud storage destination and begin moving your file data to the cloud. Our ability to move large quantities of data with little to no downtime makes moving to the cloud much less daunting. 

Lift and Shift Durability Model

A key feature to a strong migration solution is data resilience or the certainty that the data will reach the target with complete integrity, regardless of bandwidth/service interruptions.  The safety of your data upon entry and upon exit of your Lift and Shift instances is of paramount importance. Lift and Shift’s resilience is made possible by this system of records and UIDs, functioning as a persistent write-ahead log and content repository. Our underlying processors provide the ability to track the data via these records from entry to output and provide guaranteed data lineage. Should a transfer process be interrupted, each processor is checked for these records to determine where the interruption occurred, and automatically resumes the process from the last successful transfer process. The content repository is designed to act as a rolling buffer of history. Data is removed only as it ages off the content repository or as space it needed. In the event of a network failure, the content repository enables Lift and Shift to always continue the data migration once the failure is resolved at the exact point of failure.

If you have questions or to share your feedback on the Beta, please send an email to sales@buurst.com.

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Hybrid Clouds, Multi-Cloud, Private and Public clouds, do you have a plan for your journey to the cloud?  Want to start planning your journey today? Time to check out the free Beta of SoftNAS Platinum.

Historically, when you have a complicated problem to solve that involves data movement/migration, data storage/access, networking performance, and data translation, you might consider trying to integrate 3 or 4 different point products into a single solution. The bigger problem to solve quickly becomes how to get all these products to work together. You spend more time figuring out how to connect the different products than solving the original problem. You end up using ad hoc workarounds, which ends up creating new problems. If you finally get the solution running, in a lot of cases the end solution is fragile and doesn’t meet all of your original requirements. Sound familiar?

SoftNAS Platinum is built using a set of flexible components to provide you with a cloud data platform that gives you the flexibility to build solutions to help answer some of today’s and tomorrow’s Data Solution questions:

• Where do I store my data in the cloud?
• What type of cloud storage can I use and is it compatible with my application(s)?
• Can I get the level of performance my application requires from my cloud storage options?
• How do I manage the movement/migration of data between/to the cloud?
• How quickly can I get my data into the cloud?
• How do I keep my data up to date as I’m migrating it to the cloud?

• UltraFast™
  • Network data and storage acceleration
  • Ability to throttle and schedule accelerated network utilization
• FlexFiles™ (Powered by Apache NiFi)
  • Create automated data flows for migration and synchronization of data across multiple locations
  • Leverage Apache NiFi processors to perform flexible data integration and transformation
  • Access to full provenance data for each step of the data flow
  • Create your custom flows or use the built-in flow wizards and example flow templates.
• SoftNAS Enterprise NAS
  • Full-featured, enterprise cloud NAS filer
  • NFS, CIFS/SMB, AFP, and ISCSI
  • Support for cloud Block and Object storage
  • AWS, Azure, and VMware

The power of SoftNAS Platinum is truly unleashed when you combine its key components to creating business data solutions.

The CloudFabric™ gives you the flexibility to use only the components you require to build the business data solutions you need.  All are integrated as part of a single product.

This blog is the first in a series that will cover several use cases that SoftNAS Platinum can help you with.

• Lift and Shift Cloud App Migration
• UltraFast: Global Storage Acceleration
• Many to 1: Global Bulk Data Transfer and Aggregation
• 1 to Many: Global Content Publishing

SoftNAS® Platinum is the legacy version of the same platform, including a few different features, but providing the same services and capabilities as our current version. This section covers legacy features now part of both Platinum and the new and improved SoftNAS product.

About SoftNAS Cloud NAS

SoftNAS® is our integrated global cloud data platform, combining a software-defined, enterprise-class NAS virtual storage appliance, backups, data movement; and data integration/replication for IT to manage and control data centrally. Customers save time and money while increasing efficiency.

IT struggles with the ever-increasing amounts of data that businesses generate at an exponentially increasing pace from many different sources – including IoT. Through the SoftNAS Platinum product architecture, SoftNAS addresses the impracticalities that plague real-world broader cloud adoption, so IT can control its data destiny.