ABSTRACT
From a security perspective, mature enterprises recognize the intrinsic threat posed by poorly secured data protection environments. Regardless of whether it’s storage snapshot and replication, continuous data protection, or backup and recovery services, these systems can grant a savvy attacker access data with minimum effort compared to the original systems security—when security is not approached carefully. Traditional approaches to SLA compliance within data protection have focused on retention periods for the protection copies (which are usually set within the policies themselves), and basic data movement or tiering functions. Smarter approaches to data protection would instead focus on a declarative process, allowing the protection system to enact appropriate governance to achieve a variety of SLA compliance requirements. Such resource planning should be expected to be revisited daily—in a “smarter” data protection solution we would expect more variance in individual system protection start times, but more regularity in protection success levels and resource utilization across the environment.
